Indian gay rights activists voiced shock and outrage yesterday over public comments by the health minister who said that homosexuality is unnatural and a “disease” brought to India by foreigners.
Speaking at a national meeting on Monday of district and mayoral leaders on HIV/AIDS prevention, Indian Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said that gay sex was “unnatural and not good for India.”
“It is a disease which has come from other countries,” he added.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the president of the ruling Congress Party also attended the meeting, but had left before Azad spoke.
Coming almost two years to the day after a landmark Delhi High Court ruling that decriminalized homosexuality, his comments prompted a storm of protest and calls for an immediate retraction.
“I think the minister needs to apologize immediately. He has insulted the entire homosexual community,” said Mohnish Kabir Malhotra, a publicist and gay rights activist.
“Homosexuality is very much a part of nature and it even finds references in religious texts. To call it unnatural is absurd,” Malhotra said.
There was particular anger that the comments were made at a meeting of officials tasked with promoting and enforcing HIV/AIDS prevention policy at a grassroots level across the country.
“To have such a level of bias and ignorance expressed in that context about something so basic is very dangerous,” said Mario D’Penha, a historian of the gay rights movement in South Asia.
“What is farcical, given his comments, is that he said the country needs more sex education. There are a lot of gay people in India who would like to give the minister an education,” D’Penha said.
Aditya Bondyopadhyay, a lawyer and gay rights activist, said Azad’s remarks would encourage those conservative groups and religious organizations who had vehemently opposed the 2009 High Court ruling.
“When a minister, and especially the health minister, says this in public, it conveys the impression that this is government policy and that can have a huge impact on the lives of gay people who already struggle with official discrimination and police harassment,” Bondyopadhyay said.
“The religious right will jump on statements like this to increase the amount of hate,” he added.
Despite the High Court ruling and gay pride events in some major cities, homosexual culture remains shocking to many Indians, who often treat the topic as taboo.
Very few high-profile Indians are openly gay or lesbian whether in the fields of sport, politics or entertainment.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of