The Usual Suspects

India Today, December 21, 1998
Dec 21, 1998

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Fire Next Time

A debate hijacked by conflicting weirdos.

Swapan Dasgupta

Bal Thackeray is clearly losing his touch. There was a time when the unguided missile from Mumbai used to articulate what many angry Indians raved about after downing three drinks. Now he has mastered the art of scoring self-goals. At one stroke he and the Shiv Sena have achieved what all the NGOs and jholawalas put together couldn't manage after decades of sanctimoniousness. They have conferred respectability and provided legitimacy to the most deracinated bunch of leftists, libertarians and weirdos in the country.

The threats and attacks on cinema halls screening Deepa Mehta's Fire aren't merely an assault on democracy and free speech, they offend our innate sense of decency. If every disagreement or expression of displeasure is going to be accompanied by hoodlums taking the law into their own hands, then there is every reason to believe there is a cultural Emergency in operation. In a country where there is no dearth of nihilists convinced of their own monopoly over correctness, the Sena has given the cue to every determined fringe group. It was bad enough for Rajiv Gandhi's government to succumb to the rioters during the Satanic Verses controversy. It was even worse for Atal Bihari Vajpayee to cave in to Gandhian blackmail and ban a play on Nathuram Godse earlier this year. By tacitly condoning the Sena assault on Fire, the elected representatives of the people have made India an uglier place.

The ugliness is all the more marked because those whose commitment to ordinary decencies and acceptable social mores are visibly suspect have seized this opportunity to emerge as custodians of civilised norms. True, there was an undercurrent of lesbianism in Fire. In a perverse sort of way, this may have even added to the film's appeal and not merely in the alternative film circuit of the West. But like most unorthodox sexual preferences this was unstated. The Sena has allowed this to come to the fore. No wonder the militant gay movement, which has hitherto operated as website extensions of a disagreeable trend in the West, could now come out into the open and flaunt banners in Delhi suggesting that "lesbianism is part of our heritage".

It is plainly not. Thievery, deceit, murder and other IPC-defined offences have a long history. That doesn't elevate them to the level of heritage. Heritage implies a degree of social sanction. Homosexuality may have found mention in some ancient manual and even depicted in a temple carving or two, but as in the pre-promiscuous West, it was a preference that was greeted with tolerant disapproval. It was always an alternative to marriage and family but never a socially acceptable option. Before a corrupted liberalism made a virtue of moral relativism, society operated on definite notions of what is right and wrong. Stability and social cohesion have inevitably entailed being aggressively judgmental, though never intolerant.

That is why there is something insidious about an indignant fringe using Fire to attack the very institution of the family and, by implication, accepted standards of personal conduct. A debate most ordinary people would have welcomed, if only to recover their own sense of certitude, has been derailed by the Sena's rowdies and hijacked by militant gay cults. All because neither Thackeray nor his detractors could comprehend the importance of two attributes of civilised, orderly existence -- restraint and inhibition.

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