SC ruling on 377: The real problem is modern intolerance

The Supreme Court judgment yesterday (11 December 2013) that recriminalised homosexuality by upholding the validity of Section 377 of the IPC has been widely panned as antithetical to the idea of equality before the law. Many people have condemned it as a throwback to a more intolerant age, with Additional Solicitor General Indira Jaising criticising the judgment  as being the result of a “medieval mindset”. Actually, this is unfair to mediaeval India, which was nowhere as illiberal as we are now. As Manoj Mitta points out in The Times of India today, in mediaeval times we had Khajuraho, Kama Sutra, and Konark, all of which celebrated love, including same-sex love. The mediaeval mindset was, in fact, more liberal, and it was the rigidity brought in by Victorian England that we embraced as modern. [caption id=“attachment_1283455” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Reuters[/caption] Our current attitude of intolerance is thus entirely “modern”. By “our” I don’t mean only Indian attitudes, but that of the whole world. We thus find all kinds of intolerance gaining traction everywhere. The New Right can’t live with the New Left, the Tea Party can’t coexist with Centrists in the Republican party, never mind Left liberals, the Left can’t accept market economics, the French can’t live with the hijab, China can’t live with the puny defiance of a Dalai Lama, the Sunnis loathe the Shias and Ahmaddiyas, the upper castes at home can’t bear to see the Dalit standing up for his rights, patriarchy everywhere is fighting a last-ditch battle against women’s rights, and some angry feminists can’t see that there can be a male point of view - even if it is different from their own perspective. None of the current intolerance is mediaeval or ancient; it is partly the result of our growing isolation from our own inner selves and the demands society makes on us to conform and be “civilised.” Society has reached a point where civilisation has become a curse, with extreme forms of hypocrisy becoming the norm. This, in fact, entirely “modern” as seen from a western paradigm of universalism that demands uniformity in beliefs - something the ancients never thought of as critical. All pre-modern religions, for example, accepted a form of plurality in gods (Greeks, Romans, and our own platoon of gods). This, of course, led to conflicts, and in the age of empires, ruling over vast diversities of conquered peoples demanded uniformity and eradication of differences. Thus, the very idea that there can be only one truth or one god or one way of living is entirely modern - and a largely western idea driven by the need to grow empire. Both Communism and Nazism are the result of the drive for uniformity and the ultimate form of intolerance is to seek oneness and sameness for humanity as the goal. As Rajiv Malhotra writes in his book, Being Different, the west dealt with its “difference anxieties” - the discomfort all humans and human societies feel when confronted with the new and the different - by adopting “sameness” as a universal principle. Difference anxiety “refers to the mental uneasiness caused by the perception of difference combined with a desire to diminish, conceal or eradicate it. Difference anxiety occurs in cultural and religious contexts frequently.” He writes: “Such an anxiety seeks the relative comfort of homogeneous ideas, beliefs and identity. It runs counter to the natural world, where differences are inherent in the immense variety of animals, plants, flowers, seasons, rocks, and indeed every level of the cosmos.” The west sought to eradicate differences through extermination (American Indians, Australian aborigines) or M&A (acquire the different entity and digest it in the larger whole) and called this modernity. The east, and especially India, saw pluralism as a virtue and celebrated diversity and difference as the natural order of things. It is another matter that we let this plurality degenerate into iron-clad exclusivity, caste bigotry and nasty untouchability, but the basic idea of celebrating difference is fundamental to the idea of pluralism – and it is actually more modern and sophisticated a concept than so-called modernity based on achieving uniformity. The discomfort heterosexual people feel when coming across people with a different sexual orientation is natural and reciprocal and can be overcome only by defining the difference, acknowledging it, and celebrating it as vital for the greater wholeness that we can collectively create. The form of modernity that calls for uniformity is what makes us intolerant to homosexuals, not mediaeval mindsets. Consider how we label people who are different from us and think we are modern: we call them Leftists, Right-wingers, Capitalists, Commies, Fundamentalists, Conservatives, Liberals, Communal, Secular, or even derisively as “chaddiwalas” or “mullahs” or “firangs”, etc. The truth is no one entirely fits any of these labels. Labels are a “modern” and sophisticated form of exclusion. The ideas of ancient and mediaeval India were in fact more modern than the intolerance we are currently breeding in it. We are afflicted by an entirely “modern” form of intolerance, not a mediaeval one.