Against the order of nature…or of British moral police? The Open Letter against Section 377
Aug 14th, 2008 by Ashok
Most of our laws, including the outdated draconian Indian Penal Code are the legacy of the British “Empire”. Some years ago, I was rereading Kautilya’s Arthashastra as part of my ongoing research for my Epic India series, and was struck by how logical and common sensical much of it was, although it was clearly relevant to those times rather than today. On an impulse, I looked up my copy of the Indian Penal Code and tried to compare sections. I was nonplussed to find that the IPC was often completely arbitrary, irrational and often quite vague in its phrasing.
The reason is simple: Kautilya, or Chanakya as most of us now prefer to call him, was a man of genius who had a simple, direct, no-nonsense vision of united India, a peaceful, cohesive, crime-free India of the future. He cared about the country, the people, and about its prosperity.
The British, on the other hand, didn’t give a damn what happened here after they were gone. Everything they did was primarily to enable them to “rule” more effectively, keep the ‘bloody natives’ under control, and to milk this rich sub-continent for all the profit they could suck out of it. Their laws were not just draconian, they were deliberately kept vague in order to leave room for their judges, who were always of the aristocratic ruling class, to pass their own judgements based on what was expedient at that moment. In short, they created a bureaucratic and judicial system that was less concerned with justice, as Chanakya had been in an earlier age, and more with keeping power in their hands and out of the hands of the lower classes and Indians.
Section 377 of the IPC is one such terrible, unfair, imbalanced, and biased law. The law criminalizes private consensual sexual acts deemed to be against the order of nature.
I quote verbatim from the law:
377. Unnatural Offences.
Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”
Note that this is not merely a law against homosexuality but even against sex between man and woman that happens to be “against the order of nature”. But what does that mean? What is “against the order of nature”? I’m a straight man with a single life partner. But I strongly and staunchly support the right of any individual to live life freely and without the state telling them how to live or not to live. I’m against policing of all kinds, be it by the police, moral police or even the media police of today’s celeb-obsessed times.
Section 377 is in itself a law against the order of nature. Its vague, generalized phrasing puts far too much power of interpretation into the hands of the judicial system, the legal system, and the police. It is frequently and repeatedly misused to punish the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and in fact, has no place or relevance at all, except as a quotation frame in a museum as a reminder of how the British once invaded us under the guise of trade and stayed on to establish an unjust, unfair, and ruthlessly exploitative oppressive regime.
Recently, even the courts have begun condemning the law. People of all walks of life have been speaking out against it. Contemporary historians and scholars have been working to reveal the iniquities in the IPC as well as the efforts of their predecessors to suppress and cover up British atrocities and oppression across the Empire. Many have commented on how such laws were in fact meant to curb their own British officers from engaging in illicit liaisons with locals, since by their standards, for a white British man or woman to engage even in consensual sex with an Indian (or any other race) was in itself against nature. And of course, the notorious British upper class predilection for “buggering” helpless little Indian children.
This is a law that is against the very spirit of the law.
It’s time we flushed these outdated vestiges of British rule out of our body politic.
One small way to do so is the Open Letter against 377. Read it and sign it if you like. I just did.
