THE EPSTEIN FILES

The illustrious names that threaten to show up in the Epstein Files, which include Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Anil Ambani, Mette-Marit, the Crown Princess of Norway, and a host of others, seem to give banned underground outfits like Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and Paedophile Action for Liberation (PAL) in the UK; North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) in the USA; and Vereniging in the Netherlands the last laugh. Besides these countries, pro-paedophile groups have prominently existed in France, Norway and Germany. These organizations have for long called for a “reform of sex offender laws,” known by the acronym RSOL. Their main plea is to ask for an absolute lowering of the age of consent. As an RSOL member put it, “to make the age of eighteen the dividing line [between minors and adults] is to institute a ridiculous moral equivalence between little babies and sexually active teenagers.” They went on to accuse America and its “coalition of the willing” of evolving “draconian laws” to eliminate paedophilia. RSOL supporters included the late Tom Reeves and Alexander Cockburn.

Paedophile Information Exchange, founded by Michael Hanson and headed by Tom O’Carroll, lasted ten years, from 1974 to 1984, before it was disbanded. It called not just for a lowering of the age of consent, but for a total abolition of it. While its members were mostly male, it had a few women members as well. Its brief was that criminal law should only apply to non-consensual sex with minors, implying thereby that paedophilia could be consensual, and that it was about time minors were given agency. In fact, the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), a PIE affiliate, went as far as to argue that nude photographs of children were not in themselves indecent, and should therefore be exempt from legal action. Action could only be taken if it was proved beyond a measure of doubt that the children in question had been sexually exploited.

Paedophile Action for Liberation had its own magazine, Palaver. A contributor to Palaver magazine asked rhetorically: “If all paedophiles in community or private schools were to strike, how many [schools] would be forced to shut down or at least alter their regimes?”

On the other side of the Atlantic, North American Man/Boy Love Association concerned itself with pederasty and paedophile advocacy, and like PIE and PAL in the UK, sought to abolish laws that spelled out the age of consent. It argued that the so-called crimes of men who had sex with minors had to be judged on a case-to-case basis, and could not universally be regarded as coercion. By the mid-90s, NAMBLA had over a thousand members, but it was also infiltrated by policemen. Then paedophobia quickly spearheaded its decline. Today, NAMBLA is demonized and all but defunct. What pedophiliac activity continues among its members is restricted largely to the internet by unregistered organizations, like Free Spirits.

Vereniging Martijn fought for “the social and societal acceptance of child-adult relationships” in the Netherlands. Consent was so crucial to the relationship, both of the adult as well as the child, that the child had to have the freedom to withdraw from the relationship whenever it wanted. This, the outfit believed, made their activity free from taint. Eventually, Vereniging Martijn was banned in 2012. Attempts to revive it failed, with heavy-handed raids and police arrests. One of the most well-documented cases involved a man named Edward Brongersma, a Dutch researcher who actively researched paedophilia. He was such a victim of anti-paedophile mob violence, that he was one of the first persons to be allowed to avail of the new Dutch law on euthanasia and end his life.   

All over the western world outfits like PIE, PAL, NAMBLA and Vereniging Martijn faced a backlash from women’s groups, the gay community, and civil society at large. Examples abound of the persecution they faced, which included physical harm, like being pelted with stones and rotten fruit in the case of PIE, and being called “the vilest men” and stripped of their employment in the case of PAL.

NAMBLA members were expelled from the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) that regarded them as criminals. They were prevented from participating in Gay Pride marches and also banned from commemorating the Stonewall Riot of 1969. NAMBLA members used to celebrate a day known as Alice Day, or Paedophilia Pride Day. In April 2013, a ‘hactivist’ group known as Anonymous attacked them on Paedophilia Pride Day. NAMBLA was even sued by the parents of a boy who, according to them, was “stalked, tortured and murdered, and [they] mutilated [his] body…”

It will be recalled that similar charges were levelled against singer Michael Jackson by the parents of a boy who stayed with Jackson in his Neverland ranch. But in the end, the charges couldn’t be proved.

However, support for pedophilic groups came from unexpected quarters. RSOL members have appropriated the writers Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, and they snigger at those who regard Wilde as a “respectable author,” but not a pederast. Likewise, they speak about Andre Gide’s revealing diary entries that have been “conveniently pushed into the footnotes.”  Wilde and Gide once met by chance in Algiers, and Wilde succeeded in tempting Gide to spend the night with a handsome flute player named Mohammed, who, of course, wasn’t underage. But Gide’s diaries also refer to other encounters that he had with minors, in spite of his deep and abiding faith in Christianity. Religion can no doubt create a chasm in the minds of those who find it hard to abstain. And yet there is the concept of laundebaazi in Islam, which is more or less the equivalent of the western concept of man-boy love, upheld by NAMBLA.

The most vocal supporter of NAMBLA was the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.  Ginsberg is regarded as the father of the Beat generation of poets, whose famous practitioners included Jack Kerouac and Willliam Burroughs. Ginsberg joined NAMBLA to defend free speech. In his militant words, “Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witch-hunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance…I’m a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too—everybody does, who has a little humanity.” In speaking of man-boy love in terms of ‘humanity,’ Ginsberg gave an altogether new twist to paedophilia.

The witch-hunting that Ginsberg refers to seems to be for real. There was allegedly a crackdown in America in 2016 in which many paedophiles were arrested, though some, anticipating the crackdown, left the country just in time, only to remain in hiding forever, and resolving never to return home.

Historically, paedophilia and pederasty have been supported by leading Western intellectuals. Michel Foucault suggested in a suppressed 1978 interview that to assume that a child was incapable of giving his consent to sex with an adult male was itself “abuse.” He thus called for a decriminalization of consensual sex between men and boys. Foucault’s biographer James Miller quotes him as saying, “…to die for the love of boys: what could be more beautiful?”

In 1977, radical French novelist Gabriel Matzneff published a letter in Le Monde that called for a legalization of sex with minors, in his case minor girls. Calling the biological family ‘capitalist,’ the view was that children needed to be freed from parents who owned them, and pederasts did that. There were 67 signatories to Matzneff’s letter, which included Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Roland Barthes.

Literature and cinema have never shied away from showing adult-child love in books and on celluloid. Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice is regarded as a classic and taught in universities all over the world. I have myself taught the novel at Nalanda University a couple of years ago, and shown students the film, based on the novel. Then there is the film Montreal Main that shows how an adult-child relationship can be consensual.

The two prominent Indians whose names allegedly figure in the Epstein files are Hardeep Puri and Anil Ambani. However, if this seems implausible, let’s not forget that peadophilic readings are possible of South Asian literary texts, especially Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu novel Lihaaf, and Sri Lankan author Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy. Some viewers view the relationship between the man and the boy in Aamir Khan’s film Taare Zameen Par in a peadophilic vein. A short story in the anthology Out: Stories from the New Queer India has an underage boy initiating ‘sex’ with his uncle as they watch a film together in a cinema hall. In real life, Duncan Grant and Allen Waters, the two Englishmen who ran Anchorage, a shelter for street kids in South Bombay, and were accused of paedophilia, were acquitted.

As these instances show, paedophilia is generally associated with homosexual rather than heterosexual sex. Male homosexual kids often have troubled relationships with their fathers, whose masculinity is challenged by their sons’ sexuality, as seen in Karan Johar’s Bombay Talkies short, Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh.  This drives the kids in search of substitute fathers (the search-for-father motif in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) who sometimes assume the role of sugar daddies, thereby conflating the conjugal and the filial.

Paedophilia is a damning word that belongs to the same paradigm as murder and rape. Yet, the pro-paedophilia lobby argues that paedophilia is not the same as rape. It is a word that must be weighed thoroughly before it is used all too loosely.

The Epstein Files case has rocked the world. All the media coverage of the case has been unanimous in condemning Jeffrey Epstein and all those associated with him as rogues. Epstein is even spoken of as if he’s still alive, overlooking the fact that he died by what is generally believed to be suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City over six years ago. This, of course, is not to give Jeffrey Epstein a clean chit.  

Given the moral frenzy that the Epstein Files case has triggered, it is only likely that in the months to come more skeletons might emerge from the closet in the form of Pizzagate and Q Anon.

(R. Raj Rao, a writer and professor who has taught for nearly half a century, is the author of one of India’s first openly gay novels, The Boyfriend, and twenty-five other books).

 

Conservation Versus Conflict

 

 

BY R. RAJ RAO

In November 2018, just before Diwali, a female tiger named Avni was shot dead by a sharp-shooter in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district. The tiger with two cubs was said to be a man-eater that had killed nearly a dozen people. The killing led to outrage among conservationists who rightly said that the animal should have been captured rather than killed. That the tiger had become a man-eater, a politically incorrect word today, was itself under dispute. Activists pointed out, among other things, that there wasn’t enough proof that all the attacks on human beings were carried out by a single animal, Avni in this case.

I travelled to Yavatmal soon after the tiger had been shot and spoke to villagers whose family members were killed by the predator. They were unanimous in their joy that the tiger had been eliminated. “We can now celebrate Diwali in peace,” they said, and pointed out how the depredations of the tiger had made life hell for them. They were unable to get out of their homes after dark, “even to answer nature’s call”, for fear of being pounced upon by the animal. 

The villagers felt that city-based conservationists lived in ivory towers, having no idea of the panic that the presence of wild animals like Avni instilled in their minds, and the pain that they suffered on the loss of loved ones killed by tigers and leopards. One feisty woman dared the likes of Maneka Gandhi, the most visible face of conservation in India, to come and live in their midst.

But the activists were especially peeved as Avni had cubs, both of whom disappeared after she had been shot. (Eventually, one of the cubs was found, but the other continued to elude the search parties).

Today, seven years later, the conversation seems to have veered somewhat in favour of human beings. In an article titled “When Tiger Conservation Overlooks Human Lives,” anthropologist Amir Sohel points out that “Over the past five decades, an estimated 3000 men and women have been killed by tiger attacks in the Sunderbans, though the actual numbers could reach 6000 or more.” The mangrove forests of the Sunderbans, the natural habitat of the Royal Bengal tiger, roughly cover an area of 10,000 square kilometres, three-fourths of which is in Bangladesh.

The main occupations of the people of the Sunderbans are fishing, crab-catching and the gathering of honey. It is this work that takes men into the forests, in spite of its dangers. Although the use of the term ‘man-eater’ is discouraged, as it is seen as a license to kill marauding animals, the Sunderban tigers are all believed to be man-eaters. Evidence has shown that they have developed such a taste for human flesh, that they attack human beings even when deer and antelope, their natural prey, as well as domestic animals like goats and cows are freely available.

As far as tiger attacks go, some experts believe that the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district is the second-most “dangerous” place after the Sunderbans. Just this month (September 2025) as many as six people, including a child, were killed by tigers and leopards in the Tadoba reserve. That amounts to a tiger assault every five days!  So much so, that AI-enabled systems have now been installed in some twenty villages in the region to warn people of the presence of tigers in the vicinity.

Forest departments, which have always shown themselves to be on the side of tigers rather than human beings, have also begun to relent. They recently objected to the conversion of the Mhadei Wildlife Sanctuary in Goa to a tiger reserve, arguing that it was merely a “tiger corridor” for tigers moving between Maharashtra and Karnataka. Their main concern was for the loss of livelihoods that the conversion would entail, as the region is heavily populated, and a tiger reserve would lead to displacement that the locals would violently oppose.

In 2005, India had just 22 tiger reserves. Today, it has close to 60. In Tadoba and its adjoining areas alone, the number of tigers, according to some estimates, has risen from 191 in 2020 to 347 today.

Every year, on Buddha Purnima day, which falls in May when the full moon is at its brightest, the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve allows volunteers to spend the night in machans in the core and buffer areas of the reserve to assist in a tiger count. I spent the night in one such machan in 2014. The count that year, although not foolproof, showed the number of tigers in the reserve to be less than 100. If that number has tripled today, it only goes to show the success of Project Tiger, introduced by the union government way back in 1973 to save the tiger from extinction.   

However, the flip side of this victory is a disproportionate increase in the number of tigers as compared to the total area of forest cover. This surfeit not only leads to territorial rivalries among male tigers, but it also makes some tigers leave their reserves in search of new homes. Now, this is welcome in terms of genetic pooling and the prevention of in-breeding. But it also brings tigers in close proximity to human settlements, compounding the chances of conflict. A male tiger recently travelled 400 kilometres from the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in Madhya Pradesh to the Achanakmar Tiger Reserve in Chattisgarh. Another male tiger travelled 450 kilometres from the Tippeshwar Tiger Reserve in Yavatmal district to the Ramling Wildlife Sanctuary in Osmanabad district. These tigers could not have undertaken such long journeys without crossing villages, towns, highways and railway tracks along the way. After all, tiger corridors are not concatenated. Incidentally, the village where Avni was shot is only a thirty-minute drive from the Tippeshwar Tiger Reserve.

I drove to the Ramling Wildlife Sanctuary in Osmanabad, and found that its total area is a paltry 22.5 square kilometres. This, clearly, is insufficient for an adult tiger, and there’s every possibility that the migrating animal, now named Ramling, will stray into adjoining villages and towns, provoking an Avni-like situation. Forest personnel claim they tried to shift the tiger to the larger Sahyadri Tiger Reserve in Western Maharashtra, but it proved to be elusive.

The victims of tiger attacks are invariably tribals who have lived for generations in tiny hamlets bordering forests. But it’s not as if city-dwellers who go on tiger safaris aren’t at risk. Some years ago, the Supreme Court, giving its verdict on a PIL, imposed a total ban on tiger safaris in all of India’s tiger reserves. The ruling was then modified to open up 20% of the buffer areas of reserves to tiger tourism. This was because the government told the court that banning tiger tourism altogether would jeopardize the livelihoods of safari drivers and guards who operated in the reserves. With 20% of the forests now made available for tiger-sightings, the safari drivers and guards were back in business. But there were occupational hazards. I was once on a safari ride with six others in an open-topped Maruti Gypsy at the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve. The vehicle suddenly had a flat tyre, and all of us were made to get down while the driver changed the tyre, although getting off safari vehicles is strictly prohibited in tiger reserves. It was nearing dusk, and we had a close shave, as fresh pug-marks told us that a tiger had trod that very path just a few minutes ago. A similar situation prevailed at Ranthambore recently, when a Gypsy broke down in the middle of the forest, and the driver and guard disappeared under the pretext of finding a substitute vehicle, leaving terrified passengers, including children, high and dry, as night dawned.

When forests are designated as tiger reserves, tribal people who own land in the outskirts of these forests, and depend on forest produce for a living, are displaced. In a research article published in the Journal of Political Ecology, author Eleonora Fanari writes, “It is worrisome that international conservation organizations have occasionally supported the displacement of local and indigenous forest dwellers.” In this context, she especially names the Wildlife Conservation Society, and says that “Although several studies, mostly carried out by the Wildlife Conservation Society, show the positive impact of resettlements of people, including access to housing, education, ‘development’ opportunities, jobs etc., research shows that the resettlements are far from ‘voluntary’ and ‘satisfactory.’ One of the reserves that Fanari travelled to was the Melghat Tiger Reserve in Amravati District. I did not see any tribal settlements in Melghat, indicating that all of them had been relocated. However, I visited Jamni village deep inside the core area of the Tadoba Tiger Reserve before it was relocated, and spoke to villagers. They expressed their displeasure at having to leave their homes and their lands where they had been living for generations, and move far away. The presence of tigers close -by, they said, did not scare them.  They knew how to protect themselves.

Compensation, monetary and otherwise, may be offered to local populations who relocate. But compensation is harder to come by when people are killed by tigers. I remember speaking to an old woman in Tadoba whose husband was mauled to death by a tiger. She did not even seem aware that she was entitled to compensation, and certainly had no idea about how much money they owed her. Claims get mired in bureaucracy and red tape, and it takes a while before the money actually reaches the claimant, whose illiteracy can easily be taken advantage of.  

Amir Sohel points out how in the Sunderbans, where the maximum tiger deaths happen, compensation is refused if the victim did not possess a Boat License Certificate, or if the body of the victim isn’t recovered. (But how can a victim’s body be recovered if it has been consumed by the tiger)? Furthermore, compensation is only granted if the attack happened in the buffer area of the reserve, that is, presumably, not in the core area, and not outside the buffer area.

Both Fanari and Sohel use the word ‘elite’. To Fanari, it is forest officials who wield power over marginalized tribal communities who are the elite. To Sohel, the elite are urban tourists who visit tiger reserves for entertainment.

The wives of men killed by tigers in the Sunderbans become ‘tiger widows’ and are ostracized. Thus, as Amitav Ghosh writes in The Hungry Tide, they offer prayers to a goddess known as Bon Bibi for the safe return of their husbands before the latter venture out into the forest.  

The conservation-conflict interface has no easy solutions. In the end, we must learn to strike a balance between saving the tiger and saving human lives. With tiger numbers having dropped from one lakh at the beginning of the 20^th century to less than 4000 today, mostly because of human intervention, it is hard to decide who is predator and who is prey.  

 

 

 

ANTHOLOGY OR TOURIST BROCHURE?

Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing Edited by Anjum Hasan & Sampurna Chattarji. Red Hen Press, USA. www.redhen.org

 It is rare for an anthology to be announced with a certain title, and then inexplicably appear with another title. Yet that is exactly what happens to Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing edited by Anjum Hasan and Sampurna Chattarji. The original title of the compilation was What is Time. In fact, writers like me were sent a contract by the US-based publisher Red Hen Press for inclusion of my work in the book, which bore the title What is Time. Future Library, however, does not include my work, although I promptly signed the agreement and mailed it to the editors and publishers, even receiving an acknowledgment from Tobi Harper of Red Hen Press. It is possible that there are other writers who have suffered the same fate. In her Introduction, Chattarji regrets having to “let go of prose and poetry by Vijay Seshadri, Manil Suri, Vivek Shanbhag and Anis Shivani.” The reason offered for the exclusion is “lack of permission and budget constraints.”

Future Library not only has two editors, Hasan and Chattarji, but it also has two separate Introductions by each of them.

Hasan’s Introduction is a classic example of name-dropping. The anthologists she names are Adil Jussawalla, Amit Chaudhuri and Jeet Thayil. But what about anthologies edited by R. Parthasarathy, Keki Daruwalla, A. K. Mehrotra, Vilas Sarang, Makarand Paranjape and Sudeep Sen? However, this parasitic reliance on heavy-weight anthologies is an attempt to establish a false continuum between those illustrious works and the present one.

One of the main functions of an anthology is to determine a literary canon. If authors consistently appear in different anthologies, it can be said that they have a definitive place in the literary canon. Unfortunately, editors of recent anthologies rely on subjective preference, with scant understanding of the responsibility they have in canon-formation. Thus, Future Library, when compared to two anthologies that were published at more or less the same time-- Sudeep Sen’s Converse and Nabina Das’s Witness--has a very different list of authors from them, with few overlaps. The selections, here, are at best whimsical. They include relatively unknown writers, but exclude Nissim Ezekiel (the favourite whipping-boy of every anthologist from Mehrotra to Sarang to Thayil), Arun Kolatkar, A. K. Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, Dom Moraes and Vikram Seth. Hasan and Chattarji can’t even justify these exclusions on the ground that, like Converse, they are only concerned with the work of living authors. For, two late poets, Vijay Nambisan and Eunice de Souza, are both included in Future Library.

 Future Library includes both poetry and prose. It also includes writing translated from Indian languages. However, these languages are chosen at random--it isn’t as if each of India’s thirty or so official languages recognized by the Sahitya Akademi is given due representation.

The governing principle in Future Library is convenience. The anthology merely includes what its two editors could lay their hands on. There is no evidence of rigour in the work.

One of Hasan’s candid admissions is that “American readers...are likely to come to this collection with the expectation of learning from the literature something about its cultural sources.” In other words, they will use the compilation as a rich man’s tourist brochure? But can American readers be blamed? Many pieces in the anthology, especially those written in the regional languages, tend to exoticize and orientalize India, rather than present its modern face.

Like it or not, at least part of the problem with Future Library has to do with its fraught history. The anthology was originally supposed to be edited by Ravi Shankar and Sampoorna Chattarji. But then Shankar was dropped on account of his alleged indictment by the Me Too Movement. Hasan was brought in as a last-minute replacement. Together with Shankar, C. P. Surendran and Sudeep Sen were also eliminated.

Of the selections, it is poems written originally in English that stand out. Gieve Patel’s “Postmortem” abounds in raw power.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Vijay Nambisan’s “On First Looking into Whitman’s Humor” is typical of his irreverent attitude to life. Nambisan was a demolition man par excellence:

A child said to me: What is grass? and I replied,                                                                                              It is a weed, not good for much;                                                                                                 …                                                                                                                    Not that grass! The green grass—do you perhaps                                                                                               Think it to be the uncut hair of graves?                                                                                       So I threw a book at him and went on smoking.

 

Manohar Shetty’s “Taverna” mocks at religion.

                                                                                                                                  Akhil Katyal’s “Dehradun, 1990” cleverly uses dyslexia to, similarly, make its point about the hegemony of our gods.

 However, one would have liked to see a gay poem by this co-editor of The World That Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia. Especially as none of India’s distinguished gay poets—Vikram Seth, Agha Shahid Ali, Hoshang Merchant and Suniti Namjoshi—are represented in Future Library.

Among the prose selections, the piece that hogs the limelight is a longish extract from Jeet Thayil’s novel The Book of Chocolate Saints (which I reviewed for Indian Literature, Number 308, November-December 2018). But why is Thayil represented by fiction rather than by poetry, for which he is better known?

All one can say in conclusion is that should Future Library go into a second edition, the editors and publishers should take care to make the book less flawed, so that it serves, not merely as a dignified tourist brochure, but as a genuine attempt to tell readers what Indian writing truly is.

Note on the Reviewer:

R. Raj Rao is the author of six novels, six collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, two collections of plays, and much critical nonfiction, including a biography of Nissim Ezekiel. He has won academic and literary fellowships to the UK, USA, Canada and Germany, and is former head, Department of English, University of Pune. Rao is currently visiting professor at Symbiosis College, Pune.

  

 

                

  

J A I L

As a writer the thought of being incarcerated for one’s writing has to me always seemed romantic. It represents a sort of heroism where one will not be cowed down by the establishment, but will fearlessly say what one wishes to say, without resorting to that most emasculating of evils, self-censorship. Self-censorship implies that one has thrown in the towel, accepted defeat as it were. It is in this spirit of defiance and rebellion that I have often fantasized about being behind bars, the hardships of jail life being compensated for by the idea that one is here because of what one has written, which, in a way also proves that one’s work is recognized, and one has earned the right to be called a writer. In short, one has arrived.

In my long career of thirty-five years, I have written enough books (25 at last count) made up of both literary and critical writing; newspaper, magazine and digital publication articles; book reviews; academic essays in journals and anthologies, and so on, and have also given numerous interviews to print and online publications, where I may have said things that can be seen to offend.  At the Bangalore Literature Festival in December 2024, Unmana, the moderator of our panel, wondered how I ‘do this’, write as I want, and go scot-free each time. She was speaking with special reference to my 2024 novel Mahmud and Ayaz. But if I have not been taken to task for my work, it could be for a variety of reasons. The most obvious reason would be that my writing hasn’t been noticed by those likely to take offence, for I am not important enough, persona non grata.  The other reason could be that I write in English which isn’t read or understood by the majority in India. But whatever the reason, the fact is that I have remained unscathed, even at a time when homosexuality was a crime in India, and most of my literary, academic and journalistic output, as well as the interviews I have given (including a TEDx talk) have centered around homosexuality. Since September 2018, of course, homosexuality is no longer a crime here, but then my brand of radical queerness, reflected in my writing and personal life, is still viewed with disfavour.

It is for this reason, I suspect, that the government-run Sahitya Akademi, which once invited me to all their annual literature festivals (the last gig being in Simla in June 2022), and regularly published me in their journal Indian Literature, has suddenly started to ignore me. To the extent that they don’t even reply to my emails! The irony is that after the decriminalization of Section 377 of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code, the Akademi has itself gone berserk, and regularly has panel discussions on what it calls LGBTQ literature, of which I am now no longer a part, though others like Hoshang Merchant and Kalki Subramaniam invariably are.

But let me return to the topic of this blog which is the glamorization of the idea of being in jail for what one has gutsily written. I have jettisoned the idea once and for all after ordering and reading a book titled The Feared: Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners by Neeta Kolhatkar. Most of the interviews conducted by the author are with political prisoners and their families. They have been branded as (what the government calls) ‘Urban Naxals’ and some of them have been arrested for attending the Elgar Parishad in Koregaon-Bhima near Pune City in 2018.  The respondents include well-known authors and activists such as Sudha Bharadwaj, Anand Teltumbde, Binayak Sen, Kobad Gandhy and Sanjay Raut, as well as others. There is even an interview with P. Hemalatha, wife of the poet Varavara Rao who was also in jail and has now been released on ‘conditional bail’.  

What have these conversations revealed that have so demystified the idea of jail for me? Sudha Bharadwaj talks about overcrowding in Indian prisons. She says, “We were sleeping on 3’x6’ (feet) laadi (tiles). We would be stuck to each other. In Byculla jail, there were 56 other women in the first barracks where I was put, while the actual capacity is 36…We slept close to one another; the bathrooms were common and there was no body space anywhere as we stood in queues.”

To Anand Teltumbde, jail “was not something I had ever imagined in my worst nightmare.” Speaking of police highhandedness, he says, “They kept me in the lockup for 13 hours…because they did not have to worry about the consequences. Effectively…in this country you lived at the mercy of an ordinary policeman. If he does not like you, he can take away your dignity and reputation and ruin your family; it has happened in hundreds of thousands of cases and continues to happen with impunity. In one way, it was a good experience to see what people face in this country.”

Binayak Sen was placed in solitary confinement. His daughter Pranhita tells us that “…solitary confinement cells are dark rooms. The only source of light or air is through one vent. [Prisoners] have to stay in that room for most of the day. Imagine if any person is kept in such a solitary confinement cell, where there is no light and only brief interaction with others for a few hours, while most of the time one is by oneself and not able to see the world, it makes the whole situation rather depressing. That took a toll on him [Sen] and we have seen a change in him after that. After he was released, he would have sleepless nights, or wake up screaming at night.”

Kobad Ghandy lets us know his routine in jail. He says, “I’ve seen almost everyone break down. From the beginning, I made it a point to have a regime for yoga and exercises in the morning and maybe sometimes a little bit in the evening. In Tihar, we were locked up practically the entire day. We were isolated but I had Afzal Guru with me. He was extremely helpful and cooperative because it was my first jail experience. I spent most of my time studying and writing. I was not allowed, but I got an outlet to publish my work. I made it a point not to break down and keep my sanity intact. I ensured I was physically and mentally active all the time. I had a lot of health problems. I still managed.”

P. Hemalatha talks of her husband Varavara Rao being sick in jail. She says, “…it started on the day of Ramzan when he was in Taloja jail. It was in May and he was admitted to JJ Hospital in the last week. Our lawyers met him in the hospital and they informed us that he was to be kept there till the first week of June…When I went to JJ Hospital to meet him, the staff informed me that he was shifted back to the jail. I hadn’t been informed of it till then. Worse, I realized they had sent him back to the prison despite his ill health. VV [Varavara Rao] was suffering from dysentery and was vomiting. He suffered from a urinary tract infection. We were told VV was kept in the cell…with 30 other people. There were only three toilets and no bathrooms. He told us later, he would have baths in front of the toilets, such were the pathetic conditions. There was all likelihood of him falling down. In fact, the police rushed him back to the prison from the hospital without removing the catheter tube. It had to be changed every fortnight which they did not.”

Incidentally, the infamous Taloja jail was the place where the ailing Father Stan Swamy died, being denied even the simplest of things like a straw sipper. I have written about it in Kashmir Observer.

I started this blog by calling self-censorship emasculating. But perhaps the time has come for me to voluntarily emasculate myself.

 

 

 

THE CONCEPT OF HOMOSOCIALISM

Semantically, the term ‘homosocialism’ has links with homosociality, which implies the non-sexual same-sex bonding that the LGBTQIA+ community frequently uses as an alibi to deflect suspicion about its orientation. Thus, the sight of men holding hands on the streets, or walking with their arms around each other’s shoulders and waists, which passes for yaari or friendship in the heterosexist mainstream, may actually be an indication of gayness. This is also culture-specific: it is much less likely to work as an alibi in the West than it is in India and the Far East.

The concept of homosocialism, however, the way I conceive it, is political. Homosocialism resists and rejects the capitalist idea of the Pink Economy attributed to the LGBTQIA+ community. The term ‘pink economy’ refers to the highly disposable incomes that members of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially gay men, are supposed to have, possibly because we have no families to raise and households to run? Thus, all our accumulated wealth is believed to be at our disposal to splurge on lifestyle, which may include, among other things, the buying of homes and holiday homes, the buying of supercars and superbikes, the buying of fancy sartorial apparel, and splurging on foreign jaunts in business class with our sugar-dads and/or sugar-sons. But this is a reductive way of viewing things. It gives the erroneous impression that there are no poor and middle-class folk in the queer community, and it buys into the stereotype of out-of-the-closet gayness being a luxury that only rich, perverted, westernized Indians can afford.

Now this is far from the truth. There is no necessary correlation between being wealthy and being out of the closet, although there may be a correlation between being university-educated and being out of the closet. Besides, being in the closet does not make members any the lesser part of the community than coming out of it. The closet isn’t sacrosanct; it is merely a process. Those in the closet today will inevitably be out of the closet tomorrow, as laws and mindsets change.  

Homosocialism, then, necessitates the pooling of community resources to be held by and for the welfare of the community in the form of cash money, savings bank accounts, mutual funds, fixed deposits, and so on. Members may contribute according to their mite, but contribute everyone should. The contributions may be administered by registered support groups or queer co-operatives which exist in many towns and cities. Homosocialism, needless to say, must operate on trust and accountability.

Of course, homosocialism would require a measure of sacrifice and rational thinking among community members. We need to be weaned away from the lure of rainbow corporates, who in the garb of sponsoring our pride walks, are all too ready to dump their worthless merchandize on us. We must stop being impulsive buyers. We must stop wanting to be influencers on social media.

The ’crowd-funding’ that homosocialism would entail would be of yeoman service to community members. One can instantly think of the following areas where the resources can beneficially be put to use:

HOUSING

Many in the LGBTQIA+ community are ostracized by their own families. They are cruelly thrown out of their houses, all in the name of family honour, and once word gets round about their deviance, they may find it difficult to get rental accommodation anywhere. Those in the community who identify as hijras have the option of joining hijra gharanas, but the rest in the community do not have any such option. It is here that the concept of homosocialism can come to their aid. Support groups can help them find accommodation in queer-friendly spaces, and, assuming they must start from scratch, wholly or partially subsidize their lease. This will ensure that the victims have a roof over their head.

LITIGATION

In spite of a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court reading down Section 377 of the former Indian Penal Code to exclude consenting adult LGBTQIA+ persons from its purview in September 2018, cases still exist where families and institutions, in complete ignorance and violation of the law, persecute community members. This happened, for example, in Aligarh Muslim University in 2010, where a professor was dismissed from his job and thrown out of his campus flat for having consensual homosexual sex with an adult cycle-rickshaw rider. At the time of the incident, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code had already been read down by the Delhi High Court the previous year. Yet the professor was victimized. At such times, the concept of homosocialism can help victims file cases in appropriate courts, and help them bear litigation costs.

HEALTH CARE

The LGBTQIA+ community have always been susceptible to stigmatized infections like venereal disease, HIV and AIDS. No insurance company covers any of these infections in their list of claimable ailments. The reason is obvious. These infections are supposed to be brought on by patients on account of their own immoral conduct. They must thus suffer the consequences of their actions. At one time, HIV and AIDS treatments were so prohibitively expensive that they were out of reach of most in the community. That is why there were so many AIDS-related deaths all over the world. Today, the situation isn’t so bad, but there are still many who can only afford treatments in malfunctioning government hospitals. Homosocialism can come to the rescue of such patients by directing them to well-equipped private clinics and paying for their treatment.

Again, many in the LGBTQIA+ community suffer from mental health problems caused by self-inflicted homophobia, guilt, anxiety and depression. Often this makes them suicidal. Mental health is yet another stigmatized area in India. Homosocialism can provide the necessary counselling and resources to such individuals, and direct them to trained and qualified doctors and psychologists who can effectively cure them.  

EMPLOYMENT

There are enough cases where community members, even if otherwise qualified and competent, may find it difficult to land suitable jobs on account of their sexuality. The transgender community, including the hijra community, are a case in point. Invariably, their gender dysphoria works against their interests. Words like inclusivity and­ diversity amount to little more than tokenism. Merely employing a couple of transmen or transwomen in one’s firm to show that one is inclusive hardly solves the problem. Homosocialism as a concept can help unemployed community members to tide over the crisis by providing them the means of sustenance until they are gainfully employed, besides assisting them in finding the right kinds of jobs.    

BHARATIYA NYAYA SANHITA

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (Act No. 45 of 2023, Dated 25^th December 2023), BNS for short, came into effect on 1^st July 2024, less than a month after the Modi government assumed its third term in office. The bill was hastily passed in parliament at a time when 150 opposition members were suspended by the Speaker for “rowdy behaviour.”

Chapter Five of the BNS is titled “Of Offences Against Women and Child [sic]/Of Sexual Offences.” Sections 63 to 79 of the chapter correspond to Sections 375 and 376 (1), (2) and (3), as well as Section 376 A, B, C, D and E of the old Indian Penal Code (IPC). Some sections also correspond to Section 354 A, B, C and D of the IPC. In addition, a couple of new sections are introduced in the chapter. They pertain to “sexual intercourse by employing deceitful means,” and gang-rape of minor girls under the age of 18, where the punishment is stringent. It includes life imprisonment “which shall mean imprisonment for the remainder of that person’s life,” or even the death penalty. All the offences included in the chapter are cognizable offences that invite arrest.

Ironically, the notorious Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized homosexuality, has been left untouched. Some months ago, a news channel reported that the government planned to modify the wording of Section 377 in the BNS by adding a clause that made non-consensual gay sex, even among adult homosexuals, a cognizable offence. But wasn’t this already implied in the reading down of Section 377 by the Supreme Court in September 2018? Where was the need to specify it? Was this a roundabout and deceitful way of re-criminalizing Section 377, given that consent, or the absence of it, is highly subjective and difficult to prove, especially in a scenario that does not recognize same-sex marriage and civil unions? It would have been desirable, however, for the text of Section 377 to be altered to delete the trivial reference to bestiality in the section. It has given impetus to the likes of Baba Ramdev to facetiously argue that if homosexuality was legalized, the next thing that human beings would ask for is to be allowed to have sex with animals!

The sexual crimes specified in Sections 63 to 79 of the BNS deal with rape, marital rape during separation, gang-rape, molestation, voyeurism and stalking. Only some of these sections specify the gender of the victim to be a “woman.” For example, Sections 63 and 64 that deal with rape only specify the gender of the victim as female in the case of minor girls. The punishment here is age-related—it is less stringent if the girl is under 16 years of age, and more stringent if the girl is under 12 years of age, making the perpetrator liable to capital punishment. Incidentally, while women’s groups have for long been lobbying to make marital rape a cognizable offence, the BNS makes marital rape a crime only if it happens while the couple are separated.

Apart from rape, the sections pertaining to “death or…persistent vegetative state of victim” (Section 66), sexual intercourse by a person in authority (Section 68), sexual harassment (Section 75), and stalking (Section 78) are, either deliberately or through oversight, left gender-neutral, without specifying the gender of the victim. This is because the sections here have merely been copy-pasted from the old IPC, without giving them much thought. The IPC of 1860 may have wanted these offences to be gender-neutral because, to Lord Macaulay’s way of thinking, a man could technically be molested, sexually assaulted, sexually harassed and stalked by a woman, including a woman employer who is his boss. But rational thinking hasn’t gone into the offences and the resultant punishment. Why, for instance, is stalking (Section 78) a gender-neutral offence, while voyeurism (Section 77) gender-specific? Section 77 of the BNC that deals with voyeurism provides a lengthy explanation of the offence in the following words: “(Any man who) watches or captures the image of a woman engaging in a private act in circumstances where she would usually have the expectation of not being observed either by the perpetrator or by any other person at the behest of the perpetrator or disseminates such [an] image…” But what about the looking-over-the-wall that goes on among gay men in pubic toilets, which can easily be brought under the purview of “watching” someone engaging in a private act (urinating) in circumstances where they would usually have the expectation of not being observed? And so on.

The ’loophole’ in the law, if one can call it that, however, is to the advantage of the LGBTQIA+ community. Effeminate gay men and transwomen (especially street hijras) are frequently subjected to rape, molestation, stalking and sexual harassment in general by cis-het men. That the law does not specify the gender of the victim here would mean that the culprit(s) can be brought to book. But once again, precept differs from actual practice. Only recently, it was reported in the media that a man in Gorakhpur, UP, was gang-raped in a lodge by four men. However, the police refused to file a First Information Report (FIR) as, according to them, in post-Nirbhaya India, only a woman can claim to be raped. Male-rape has gone on for decades without redress. In exceptional cases, it has led to suicide among the victims, who are unable to come to terms with their ‘masculinity’ being compromised.

While the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita has come in for much criticism, for example, because it extends the police custody of an accused person from the present 14 days to a period of three months, and life-imprisonment to imprisonment for the remainder of the person’s life, it is hoped that some of what I have called the loopholes in the BNS make it possible for the LGBTQIA+ community seek justice that has been denied to us for ages. All it would take is an astute prosecution lawyer with the gift of the gab to swing the judgment in our favour.

 

  

 

Apna Time Aayega?

Vedant Agarwal, the seventeen-years-and-eight-months-old teenager who killed a young man and woman when he crashed his car into their bike on Pune’s midnight streets last weekend, has been kept at the Nehru Udyog Kendra Observation Home in the city for two weeks. Here he will eat, pray, play and sleep with the other boys of the home, which can accommodate up to a hundred boys between the ages of 14 and 18. All of them will also be subject to counselling sessions by psychologists and psychiatrists. The similarity of routine, however, is more than offset by the dissimilarity in the profiles of the other boys on the one hand, and Vedant Agarwal on the other.

Without exception, the other 99 inmates of the home would be destitute boys, orphans in all probability, picked up from the streets for petty and not-so-petty offences. For them, seeing a boy like Vedant Agarwal in their midst would be too in-your-face and difficult to handle. It would give them goosebumps. That a boy of their age can incur a bill of Rs. 48,000 in pubs on a single night, drive at 200 kilometres per hour in the dead of night a Porsche costing Rs. 2.5 crore without a license (and a license plate), kill people, and get away with it, is stuff they would only have seen in Bollywood movies.  Seeing such a figure in the flesh right amongst them can cause them to go berserk. Even adults would find this difficult to cope with, let alone boys at the impressionable ages of 14 to 18.  

What this would trigger in the boys isn’t hard to foresee. Already accustomed to a life of crime, for which they are in the home in the first place, it would lead to a variety of behaviors ranging from violence to robbery to sodomy. Their victim would obviously be the boy who is their exotic other, the bade baap ka beta, Vedant Agarwal in this case.

The boys might be under the supervision of wardens and instructors during the day, which can ensure a measure of discipline. They also have a strict time-table that keeps them occupied. But who can tell what goes on in their dormitories at night? Homes like the Nehru Udyog Kendra Observation Home do not have special cells for VIP inmates. Everyone sleeps in the same dorm. The homes are poorly staffed, with usually a single warden on night duty, who would be too scared to deal with the adrenalin of teenage boys at this most dangerous age in a human being’s life, boys who can easily gang up against him. The most pragmatic thing for the warden to do, then, is to leave the boys to their devices. 

Disparities do not merely exist in the background of the boys, as compared to the Agarwal kid. The future of the boys, once they leave the home, is unlikely to be substantially different from what it has always been. All of them are doomed to return to a life of poverty and misery, and quite possibly crime. All of them are likely to be in and out of jails throughout their life. While the rap song from the Ranveer Singh Bollywood blockbuster film Gully Boy is apna time aayega, the reality for boys in observation homes is more like apna time kabhi nahi aayega.

By contrast, Vedant Agarwal has his father’s business (the father is everywhere referred to as a “prominent builder”) waiting to absorb him. And, as we know, Pune, where the Agarwals of Brahma Realtors have set up shop since a long time, has one of the most thriving real estate businesses in the entire country.

Not just that. Unlike the incompetent defence lawyers provided to the boys by the state, Vedant’s family can afford to hire the best lawyers to swing the vote in their favour. As such, the inane punishment initially meted out to him by a lone member of the Juvenile Justice Board, who asked him to write a 300-word essay on road accidents, and work with the city’s traffic police for a week, has led to the suspicion that money changed hands to allow the boy to go scot free.

But let me return to what I said about violence, robbery and sodomy on the part of the inmates of the home. I find myself being non-judgmental and sympathetic to this. For, rather than seeing these behaviours in a literal sense, I see them as metaphors to avenge the injustice that the boys have suffered since birth. And when a spoilt brat like Vedant Agarwal is suddenly thrown in their midst, it is an opportunity too good to be thrown away. Not every day does such an opportunity come the way of inmates of homes like the Nehru Udyog Kendra Observation Home.

Now, violence would take the form of regularly bullying and beating up the rich kid while at the home. Robbery would have wider implications, for, having become aware of the rich kid’s existence, the inmates can continue to extort money and goodies from him long after all of them have left the home. But the most symbolic form of avenging injustice is, to my mind, sodomy, which in a home for destitute boys would take the form of anal rape.

Homosexuality has always been rampant in prisons, and one can never generalize about whether it is forced, consensual or situational. Each case would have to be examined individually before one can come to a conclusion. But in an observation home for minor boys, it cannot but be sodomy.

My intention here isn’t to justify sodomy. But it is to illustrate that sometimes the process itself is the punishment. Sodomy, by reversing the oppressor-victim binary, can scar the male victim for life, especially as it challenges his masculinity. It is thus bound to serve as a deterrent, not just to Vedant Agarwal himself, but to all his friends (who would invariably be of his own social class) to whom he might, overcoming his shame, narrate his ordeal. They may think twice before drinking and driving, driving without a valid license, and over-speeding on city roads.