re: Dormant Anti-Gay Laws Are Still Bad Anti-Gay Laws

Raju Narisetti — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:07:59 GMT

Email from Arvind Kumar:

I am not against killing this law. Nor am I saying that we should leave all laws alone. I'm saying that they should be challenged when it is worth doing so, and the affected people must be the ones challenging such laws. Otherwise, it is asking for trouble with the amount of laws that can be challenged. You're going to see thousands of frivolous lawsuits challenging some law or the other. Many of these will be filed by those who wish to get a feel of the system.

In India, laws mean nothing. It is no rule-of-law state. Laws are just words on paper and if activists hadn't dug out this law, no one would have heard of it. This law is a remnant of the 19th century British policy. It is no more than that.

I have appreciated those who file PILs and am grateful to them for achieving at least some things that have benefited me, but I have reservations about PILs too! First, they are acts of frustration and instead of fixing the system, they seek the intervention of the court. Second, it blurs the lines that define the separation of powers.

A real case: In Bangalore, a magistrate ruled that the proceeds from the sale of tickets in Cubbon Park should be used to take care of seniors. Sounds like a noble thing, but this decision is not the business of the judiciary.

A more famous case: The Tamilnadu legislature once sentenced the editor of a magazine to two weeks in prison! This was an example of the legislature doing the work of the judiciary (in a bad way too)!

The executive does the job of the legislature all the time. IAS officers suggest and draft policies that politicians are supposed to think of.

If you want a strong system, you should set down rules and follow them. You're opening up the system to chaos if you are flexible with implementing the rules. In this specific case, it is not as if the rules do not permit an injured party to challenge the law.

Arvind

Guess I am going by myriad news reports and well respected groups.

I still don't understand your defense of the law except on principle that we should leave all laws alone. There have been numerous cases filed in public interest and the government has also said--at least key ministers--it is a problem. So what has imitating western counterparts got to do with it?

It isn't like killing this law would create precedence. If it did, the law would be long overturned

Anyway these are just viewpoints I suppose.

Raju

From Arvind:

I mentioned the West because the issue of gays is an obsession for

Western liberals and conservatives. To be fair, it is not the entire

Western hemisphere but just USA. Other anglophone countries and

Western European countries tend to imitate the politics of USA with

various degrees of amplification. e.g.: Canada has claimed to be more

liberal than the US in the last 15 years.

Americans are obsessed with abortion, gay marriage and gun control.

None of these issue strike a chord in me. Other Asians, East

Europeans, Caribbeans and South Americans don't seem to care either.

Although the media in the West uses political terms like left and

right to refer to politics in India, it is inappropriate to do so as

he issues are food prices, corruption, caste of the candidate, Hindu

vs. Muslim (this is a straight religious clash and has got nothing to

do with left or right), water problem, power outages, etc.

Interestingly, while the issue of abortion is a hot issue in USA, no

one cares one way or other in India. The bureaucrats decide something

and that stays as the rule. If they change the rule to be the exact

opposite, no one would care!

It is the same on the issue of gays. Half the voters in USA will get

agitated if a law regarding gays is passed, the other half will get

agitated if the law tilts the other way. In India, someday a

bureaucrat might suggest a law that gets implemented and no one would even notice it. It might get changed the other way and no one would

still care!

re: Dormant Anti-Gay Laws Are Still Bad Anti-Gay Laws

sonali raj — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:57:49 GMT

There is no law that says that two people of opposite sex cannot hug in a stationary car in a parking lot (unless one sees hugging as indecent behaviour and the inside of a private car as a public place), but the police harasses such couples nevertheless. Do these laws count if the police just feels like harassing people anyway? Especially since the people who get harassed are weak - teenagers and so on and have no clue about the law book, plus are nervous about the police irrespective of whether they know they've done nothing illegal...