Tasneem Kabir Emulating
In a “historic” judgement a few days ago, the Supreme Court of India declared that the Article 377 (that criminalized sexual activities against the order of nature) of the Indian Penal Code stood no more. It is a historic judgement alright, but it brings with it the need to pause and look back at what we have made of our cultural legacies today.
While this news has ushered India into the international spotlight, with various reputed international dailies covering the issue and the judgement, the timing of the abrogation seems rather peculiar.
As for the UK, The Equality Act 2010 makes discrimination against lesbians and gay men in the provision of goods and services illegal while same-sex marriage was recognized legally in the year 2014.
Going even further back, The Netherlands, one of the first countries to accept homosexuality, paved way for the first legally recognized same sex marriage as early as 2001.
These facts, when juxtaposed with the fact that now Article 377 of the IPC is void, present a reality that is far greyer than the rainbow symbolic of the LGBTQ Community: We are progressing towards a scenario where are reduced to mere apes – emulating and imitating the West in all spheres of an individual’s life.
Pages of history are replete with instances where the Western world has given in to the exoticization of the East in general and South Asia in particular.
This exoticization makes us out to be the culturally-bound societal set-up that has no regard for human rights and humanitarian issues.
This is how the South Asian fall victim and succumbs to the urge to emulate the West and adopt its culture blindly in its entirety, so much so that the populace is willing to entirely overturn and give up on the thinking process that it has harboured over generations.
While there is no objection to adopting progressive, global ideologies, it surely can’t be done at the risk of losing one’s own identity.
What’s more, historic records are evidence enough that invaders and colonizers through the ages believed that winning over the ideologies of the people to be invaded was far more gratifying than merely acquiring land-bound territory.
There is a grave parallelism that can be drawn – the West is infesting our minds with the ideals that THEY uphold, to carve out of us subjects that are in tune with THEIR needs and prerequisites. These mental infiltrations and invasions need to be put to a stop, and immediately at that.
All in all, the issue of decriminalizing homosexuality is of a nature of muti-layered complexity, although it may not seem like it on the surface.
As anyone with half a mind to put two and two together, can figure out that the dangers of nuclear wars loom constantly over our heads as global citizens of the 21st century.
Add to that the psychological and ideological battles that we as Easterners have to constantly endure, and you have the perfect and fail-proof recipe for a clean and ash-less wiping out and expunction of a people, a nation and a significant community.
Issues such as this will crop up time and again in a growing (swiftly, too!) economy like India, allowing us to set the course ahead – either towards an ever-accentuating ethnic identity or a plagued, half-alive, culturally unsound quasi-identity.
The author is the feature editor of The Legitimate
