Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?
By Sarah Hafeez
26 February, 2014
Countercurrents.org
“The judgement has treated people with a different sexual orientation as if they are people of a lesser value,” is what Leila Seth, former Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh High Court, former judge in the Delhi High Court and Indian novelist Vikram Seth’s mother wrote in an Indian national daily this January apropos the Supreme Court judgement decriminalizing homosexuality.
Members of the all-women Russian band Pussy Riot, who were released from prison December last, had to spend twenty-one months behind bars for having "undermined the moral foundations" of the nation through their music supporting the rights of the LGBT community, as Russian President Vladimir Putin put it. They have been arrested yet again this month for making anti-Putin music at the Sochi Winter Olympics venue.
Similarly, Sri Lanka is reported to have come down hard on gay and lesbian groups not only within its boundaries but without as well, via visa bans and the like prior to the Common Wealth Heads of Government Meet held November last year.
It becomes imperative, then, to try and unspool how this fear psychosis in a nation state or a community with those who are ‘different’ seems almost universal, so to speak. In conservative theocratic nation states, for instance, it is not the minorities who face the flak for belief in a religion other than the official religion but the atheists and ‘non-believers’.
With specifically six religions recognised by the Constitution of an island nation in Asia and freedom of religion a constitutional right there, belief in god is taken to be a given. So what religious majorities fear is not a God different from theirs and a religion different from theirs but the possibility of there not being a God at all! It is as if atheists pose a subversive force and a threat to a system and set of beliefs so deeply entrenched in society that they almost become the embodiment of anarchy, disorder and chaos.
Similar are the roots which xenophobia stems from. The Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and other such cases of state-sponsored genocides are what in history have come to define acts of persecuting a particular race of people other than those who belong by ‘natural’ right . The fear of erasure of one’s own species, the corruption and defilement of one’s genus is a fear that has led nations to commit the most horrific of crimes against humanity.
Similarly, in a country like India for instance, much of the scorn and derision meted out to transgenders and bisexuals stems from the fear of anatomical and sexual orientations drastically different from the ‘natural’ order. It is almost as if one is frightened to look within and is apprehensive about finding the possibility of housing a nature so ‘unnatural’ to the order of things.
Which is why, one’s scorn and derision towards the queer is in fact an external manifestation of the fear of the unknown within oneself. Which is why the word ‘queer’. Power equations are set when a certain perspective is chosen over the other. In most cases, the perspective of the ‘us’ comes to stand as the standard order of things and anything divergent from this order becomes ‘the other’, the queer.
Which forces to the fore this extremely perturbing question about the psychology of ‘us’.
I say ‘us’ because it becomes the operative clause in all power equations between the ‘us’ and the ‘other’. The exclusion principle plays so strongly upon the majoritarian psychology that it becomes an uncomfortable aspect of ‘us’, something we are not easily able to acknowledge or admit. In truth, the ‘us’ in us refuses to recognise how weak and crippled our being of a whole makes us.
We are blinkered and ossified into set precepts which harden us into becoming incapable of appreciating different natures. Our choosing to cling to our majoritarian identities unconsciously forces us into rejecting the truth of differences in human nature and the possibilities of differences in human nature. We lull ourselves into a false sense of security in numbers. While ironically enough, it is never the solitary ‘other’ who is intimidated by the overwhelmingly large nature of the ‘us’, but in fact, it is us who are so paranoid about the fact of the existence of the singular ‘other’.
And it, thus, becomes slightly disconcerting to read the universally vaunted lines from the United States Declaration of Independence that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
So then where does he who is not created ‘equally’ go? Which nation and where the place? Who shall secure his “unalienable rights” for him? If a state so vehemently thrusts its dictat over him and so peremptorily and so sanctimoniously governs over him, then does this state have the courage to accept that it also thereby ‘derives its just powers’ from the consent of him, one of the governed?
And where and how then does ‘the other’ ever get to compete equally in ‘the pursuit of Happiness’?
Sarah Hafeez is a post-graduate student of The Asian College of Journalism
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