INDIAN GAY rights activists expressed outrage yesterday over the federal health minister’s declaration that homosexuality was a “disease” brought to the country by foreigners.
“Even though it (homosexuality) is unnatural, it exists in our country and is now fast spreading, making it tough to detect its spread,” Ghulam Nabi Azad said at a HIV/Aids convention in New Delhi attended among other luminaries by prime minister Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, head of the ruling Congress Party, senior cabinet members and MPs.
“With relationships changing, men are having sex with men now. Though it is easy to find women sex workers and educate them on sex, it is a challenge to find them (gay men),” the minister stated two years after Delhi’s high court overturned a 148-year-old Victorian law declaring homosexuality to be a crime punishable by up to 10 years in jail and fines.
“The minister needs to apologise immediately. He has insulted the entire homosexual community,” Mohnish Kabir Malhotra, a gay rights activist said.
“His statement is completely outrageous and for a health minister it is surprising that he has not been through the World Health Organisation’s guidelines in which homosexuality was taken off the list of diseases years ago. “To call it unnatural is absurd,” he added.
A health ministry spokeswoman Shefali Sharan said Azad’s remarks were quoted out of context and that when he referred to “disease” he meant HIV/Aids and not homosexuality.
“In our line of work, the last thing we need is for some idiotic minister to make a statement like this,” Anjali Gopalan, head of the NAZ Foundation that works with HIV positive victims, said.
“Which planet is he living on? Either he has no understanding of this issue, or he just doesn’t care,” she added.
Other activists maintained that the minister’s remarks would “gladden” conservative groups and religious organisations who had virulently opposed legalising homosexuality in 2009.
The federal government while presenting its side of the argument in the petition seeking to overturn the 1982 law which considered homosexuality an “unnatural offence” had also also termed it a “disease”.
Its counsel told the Delhi high court that, if legalised, homosexuality would “devastate” society as everybody would indulge in gay sex.
Homophobia remains rampant across the country despite the 2009 court ruling, with a recent nationwide survey by the CNN-IBN television news channel revealing that as many as 73 per cent of Indians believe homosexuality should be illegal.
The poll, confined to urban neighbourhoods, showed 83 per cent of respondents felt homosexuality was not part of Indian culture whilst 90 per cent said they would not rent their houses to a gay or lesbian couple.
Meanwhile, according to UNAIDS, the UN’s programme on HIV/Aids, India has some 5.7 million people infected with HIV but activists maintain that gay sex is only marginally responsible for spreading the disease.
In April, the UN said India was witnessing a 50 per cent drop in HIV/Aids cases as instances of new infections dropped from 24,000 per year in the beginning of the decade to 12,000 annually.