Clear as Madh: Hotel raids to porn ban, the nanny state fuses with moral police

June 1999. There’s a pay-as-you-go gay party happening on Madh Island in Mumbai. Fireworks. A drag queen shown. Male strip-tease. Even though gay sex is criminalized under Section 377, these parties are not uncommon. But this time it turns out differently. The police are waiting. They have been waiting for an hour. They bust the party, haul the organisers, strippers and partygoers to the police station. According to India Today, some of those hauled to the police station say the police forced them to pose semi-nude for pictures to incriminate them. “It was a real nightmare,” says one of the organisers. “It was certainly an attempt to tarnish our family image.” Nonsense, says Additional Commissioner of Police, Rakesh Maria. “Rich youth can’t commit a crime and get away by using money power or influence.” August 2015. The same Rakesh Maria, now Mumbai police chief orders a probe into last week’s raid by the Malwani police in two-star hotels of Madh Island and Aksa where police barged into hotel rooms and hauled some 40-odd couples to the police station, where some were charged with “indecent behavior in public”, humiliated, fined and held for five hours. A 19-year-old girl tells Midday she wants to commit suicide because of the stigma and because her parents are not talking to her anymore. [caption id=“attachment_2386252” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP image[/caption] “So no Mumbai cops suspended for harassing young couples and the cops themselves will inquire if their actions were fine. Wow! So impartial,” tweets Vir Sanghvi. When homosexuals demand equal rights as heterosexuals surely this is not what anyone was contemplating – cranking up moral policing all around for everyone. To be sure 2015 is not the same as 1999. 1999 was about a party in a part of Mumbai notorious for rave parties. Forget Section 377, there are many laws and licenses that could have been in violation – liquor laws, DJ laws, party permits. In a similar 2013 raid at a gay party, also in Madh Island, police said they found “six eunuchs who were dancing indecently and the men were groping them”. They were charged with indulging in obscene behavior. But in 2015 it’s not about a party, lap dancers or striptease, it’s not about a drug and alcohol-fuelled bash. This time the police barged into private hotel rooms and rounded up couples whose main crime seems to be they were paying for their privacy. That these couples who rented a room for privacy should be charged with public indecency is an irony that boggles the mind, but escapes the police. While the differences between 1999 and 2015 are undeniable, what’s equally clear is that underlying motive has stayed rigidly the same. It has become more calcified in its definition of the straight and narrow. In the end, it all boils down to the same thing - shaming sexuality, gay, straight, trans, whatever. Sexuality outside the marital bed, whether it’s premarital or extramarital, becomes justification for humiliation, harassment, fines, calls to parents and worse. The nanny state fuses with the moral police. These issues are hard to fight for. Who wants to stand up for the party rights of gay men and male strippers? Who wants look like they are defending their 19-year-old checking into some two-star hotel for a few hours of sex? Who wants to be outraged on behalf of some adulterous couple whose rendezvous was shattered by the police? We’ve all seen Masaan. We know how that story ends. Columnist Swapan Dasgputa writes while talking about the porn ban that “Pornography is a cause not worthy of standing up for.” Neither is premarital sex or extramarital affairs in two-star Madh Island hotels. But moral policing is a slippery slope. Gay parties yesterday. Private hotel rooms today. And before you know it the police are busting open doors to your bedroom or checking out your browser history because the safe zone of what is permissible, what is “worthy of standing up for” keeps shrinking. Dasgupta writes, not unreasonably, that “the battle is all about achieving an enlightened compromise between the existing social consensus and individual licence.” “Enlightened” of course is the key word. Who will get to be the enlightened one who crafts that compromise? Some babu with a moral axe to grind? An outraged lawyer named Kamlesh Vaswani in Madhya Pradesh? Deputy Commissioner (Zone XI) Vikram Deshpande in Mumbai? Rakesh Maria? The RSS? The Supreme Court? The Supreme Court is ruling that in modern times a live-in is an “acceptable norm. It is not a crime.” Of course, if one of those same couples had been in one of those hotels in Madh Island, they could have found themselves hauled to a thana and charged with public indecency and fined because they would not have been able to show the all-important marriage certificate. In India these questions have usually been dismissed as the preoccupations of the decadent elite that thinks it’s living in San Francisco or New York. Even in that 1999 gay party case, a big deal was made about the fact that one of the organisers came from a wealthy diamond merchant family with political connections. It was presented as the upright policeman trying to stand up to the rich and powerful attempting to cover up the sexual games of their wayward children. But this latest raid happened in two-star hotels, hardly the playground of the rich and powerful. Their extramarital assignations in five-star properties will not be interrupted by raids like this. Forget the police, not even room service will breach the Do Not Disturb sign on their doors. The porn ban was the source of much merriment around India (and the world) because it raised the ludicrous vision of some beady-eyed babu with a red pencil diligently scrolling through 857 sites with names like BananaBunny and allfree-nude-oldgranny-mature-women-xxx-porn-pics. The Mumbai raid raises far more disturbing visions of the midnight knock that can also come at midday or 3pm as it did in Madh Island. This particular raid might well have been overreach by some overly zealous police officer. But what gave that officer the sense that the climate was right to act on his zeal? Which political Mogambo khush hua by this righteous crusade? Suddenly it does not all seem so funny any more.