“Who is the expert to explain the order of nature?,” asked India’s Supreme Court during a hearing on overturning the landmark 2009 High Court decision to declare Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code unconstitutional.

Section 377 is a 148-year old Colonial era law which made homosexual intercourse a criminal offense. 148 years ago the British decided that same-sex intercourse was an “unnatural offense.” Today, 65 years after the British Raj was kicked out of India,  the moral brigade among Hindus, Muslims and Christians in India are united in fighting to keep their law in place. This is the same moral brigade that every year incites riots and killings in their relentless quest to prove moral superiority over each other’s religions.

It’s time for this moral brigade to use this unity to fight injustices that are really and truly against the order of nature. Injustices like thousands of young girls being trafficked into prostitution and child marriages like cheap commodities. Heinous injustices like millions of female fetuses being aborted because they are an unwanted burden. Young men and women brutally murdered in ‘honor killings’ because their love is considered against the ‘order of nature.’ And millions of Dalits who are dehumanized and degraded everyday because they are considered to be less than human.

As for criminalizing gay sex under Section 377, Chief Justice Ajit Prakash Shah and Justice S Muralidhar got it absolutely right in their ruling:

If there is one constitutional tenet that can be said to be underlying theme of the Indian Constitution, it is that of ‘inclusiveness’. This Court believes that Indian Constitution reflects this value deeply ingrained in Indian society, nurtured over several generations. The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognising a role in society for everyone. Those perceived by the majority as “deviants’ or ‘different’ are not on that score excluded or ostracised.

Where society can display inclusiveness and understanding, such persons can be assured of a life of dignity and non-discrimination. This was the ‘spirit behind the Resolution’ of which Nehru spoke so passionately. In our view, Indian Constitutional law does not permit the statutory criminal law to be held captive by the popular misconceptions of who the LGBTs are. It cannot be forgotten that discrimination is antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster the dignity of every individual.

It’s Valentine’s day. A day to celebrate love and romance by getting suckered into buying all manner of red, pink and heart shaped things. Yes I belong to the Valentine’s Day, Bah! Humbug! camp. But I still remain fascinated by the sheer brilliance of marketing a day that results in mind-boggling facts like this one – ‘11 awesome facts about the American romance industry.’

Speaking of Valentine’s day facts, here’s a little known one that I found interesting – ‘Uzbekistan cancels Valentine’s Day‘

Instead of Valentine’s Day, the authorities are trying instead to promote the study and appreciation of a local hero, the Moghul emperor Babur, whose birthday falls on 14 February.

Indians remember Babur as the Emperor whose bloody conflicts and sieges laid the foundations of the Mughal Empire in India. An empire that would last some 325+ years before it was taken over by the British.

Babur’s shadow hangs ominously over India even today. It is believed that the Babri Masjid was commissioned by Babur in 1528. A site that has, and centuries later continues to remain a source of conflict between Hindus and Muslims. In 1992 the mosque was torn down by Hindu activists and the ensuing riots claimed the lives of 2,000 people.

Babur. Uzbekistan’s hero who planted the seeds of centuries worth conflict in India. But there is at least one thing the moral police in India and Uzbekistan agree on – they both hate Valentine’s Day.

Image via Wikipedia: Khusrau Shah Kokultash pays homage and fealty to the first Mughal Emperor Babur, prior to the Battle of Khanwa.

Going. Not Going. Going. After weeks of speculation, Salman Rushdie finally pulled out of the Jaipur Literary festival over fears that he is being targeted by assassins from the Mumbai underworld.

Via Hindu: “I have been informed by Intelligence Bureau sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to eliminate me. …It would be irresponsible of me to come to the Festival in such circumstances; irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience, and to my fellow writers. I will therefore not travel to Jaipur as planned,” Mr. Rushdie said in a statement read out by the Festival’s producer Sanjoy Roy.

Here is Salman Rushdie in his own words in Vanity Fair describing how and why his friend Christopher Hitchens stood by him after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa calling for his death in 1989.

He, too, saw that the attack on The Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence, that, across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes—blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, “insult” and “offense.” And he intuited that beyond this intellectual assault lay the possibility of an attack on a broader front. He quoted Heine to me: Where they burn books they will afterward burn people. (And reminded me, with his profound sense of irony, that Heine’s line, in his play Almansor, had referred to the burning of the Koran.) And on September 11, 2001, he, and all of us, understood that what had begun with a book burning in Bradford, Yorkshire, had now burst upon the whole world’s consciousness in the form of those tragically burning buildings.

During the campaign against the fatwa, the British government and various human-rights groups pressed the case for a visit by me to the Clinton White House, to demonstrate the strength of the new administration’s support for the cause. [...]

(On that visit to D.C., I stayed in the Hitchens apartment, and he was afterward warned by a State Department spook that my having been his houseguest may have drawn the danger toward him; maybe it would be a good idea if he moved house? He remained contemptuously unmoved.)

Are we to believe that a government that successfully pulled off such complex events under the shadow of terrorist threats as the Commonwealth Games, the 2001 Cricket World Cup, and an Obama state visit could not protect a writer and the attendees of a literary festival? The same writer who has been visiting India regularly since the fatwa, and even the same literary festival in 2007? What a bunch of baloney. The simple fact is that there is an election coming up in Uttar Pradesh and the Congress party does not want to ruffle any feathers in the Muslim community.

It’s a sad day for democracy in India. And a sadder day that Hitchens is not around to excoriate the whole lot of them…including Rushdie.

And here’s why….

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