How Delhi performs a ghar wapsi for gays
If you thought "conversion therapy" was something only loony fringes of Sangh Parivar were deploying to help deviant Muslims and Christians return to the mother fold of all religions, aka Hinduism, you can't be more wrong. As this scathing exposé by Mail Today lays bare, the "medical malady" of being a homosexual has a number of curers, who vouch for conversion therapy to yank the LGBT people out of their peculiar disease.
Since the faith in conversion and its ability to cleanse a much-lived individual of all his/her affliction, whether religious or physiological, rests deep among us Indians, let's just call a spade a spade and describe the phenomenon a "ghar wapsi of gays".
At the cost of giving further life to spurious claims like ghar wapsi and love jihad, debated and debunked in all quarters of the public sphere, but still thriving in Hindutva heartlands, this extension of the twin metaphors to what's happening inside state-of-the-art "super specialty clinics" is being made to highlight the plight of LGBT people, particularly gays, in the heart of the national capital. So if you thought bustling metropolises like New Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata will save you from homophobic medical, legal and penal systems in place, you are way off the margin.
While a number of doctors and licenced sexologists recommend horrific electric shock therapy, antibiotics, hormone replacement procedure along with psychological counseling to heal the homosexuals, restoring them to their "normal" heterosexual functions such as enjoying the company (sexual and otherwise) of the opposite sex and getting down to the business of marrying and fathering a child with a suitable (caste, religion approved, of course) female of the species, the political fraternity, too, does its two bits to contribute to the air of paranoia.
Not just quacks recommending ayurvedic and homeopathic therapy to treat homosexuality, the biggest luminary among whom is certainly Baba Ramdev who claimed yoga could cure gays and lesbians, even doctors with fancy degrees and accreditations to medical boards practise and preach not just homophobic but downright unethical, illegal and in fact dangerous treatments to cleanse gays of their malady. Obviously, the rates vary: from lakhs of rupees extracted from rich but misguided families of hapless gay persons, to a few thousands from those who resort to places like Dr Dilbag Clinic in Delhi's Uttam Nagar, which claims to offer "total cure" for homosexuality in just one month.
This medical and legal phrasing to showcase a non-existent therapy for an imagined disease is exactly what we should expect from a country in which the apex court has reinstated a decrepit colonial law that criminalises sex against the "order of nature". In fact, and this has often been interpreted as a classic "the-government's-hands-are-tied" kind of a tactic, India has sided with nations like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and China, among others to vote against a United Nations proposal to extend the same rights and benefits to same-sex spouses of UN staffers, irrespective of the laws in the staffer's country of origin.
If the Mail Today exposé tells us anything it is this: the bias against what's perceived as natural and automatic - heterosexuality in case of sexual orientation; Hinduism in case of religion - runs deep and percolates from the topmost to the lowest rungs of society. Without institutional support, such as having in place a robust legal framework of (human) rights, as well as ensuring wide-scale cultural, educational, medical scaffolds to help them live regular lives, just as well as their heterosexual counterparts, we will continue to endanger the lives of our fellow LGBT people.
It's certainly not enough to express shock and horror, or to laugh off and ridicule the doctors who are so obviously guilty of medical malpractice in this case. While legal action against them must be taken, how do we stop this growing malaise of engineering ghar wapsis of gays and lesbians in India?
As Ireland becomes the nth country to legalise same-sex marriage, India, along with a string of nations with mind-boggling human rights records, brands its homosexual citizens as "criminals". Section 377 not only forces them to either leading closeted lives and destroying many more in the process (as was evident in AIIMS doctor's case, who killed herself and blamed cruelty on the part of her gay husband for the extreme step), but also, pushing them into seeking questionable, hazardous and thoroughly discredited "therapies" to cure themselves of homosexuality.
You can't just have one without the other. Until Section 377 continues to taint Indian jurisprudence, there will quacks vouching to cleanse the "disease" from gullible individuals. Similarly, until you have political parties, ruling or not, giving covert nod to dishonest and ruthless social engineering experiments like ghar wapsi and love jihad, and not impeaching its members and elected representatives in Parliament who openly spew hate speech against religious minorities, the latter will carry on feeling like a sociocultural malady, which must be purged.
It's time we put a stop to the ghar wapsi schemes, of all hues and kind.