Why the government wants a threesome with you and me
Yesterday, as if catching up on the liberal-speak that the widely-criticised #Pornban evoked forcing its eventual albeit partial withdrawal, attorney general Mukul Rohatgi, on behalf of the Centre, said: "We cannot be present in everyone's bedroom." He added: "We cannot become a totalitarian state."
Interesting choice of words. In the refutation, there's a quasi-acceptance, rhetorically speaking.
What does the government mean when it says it cannot be present in everyone's bedroom? Does it mean it can be present in the bedrooms of some/a few/many/most? Does it mean its presence in our bedrooms is not a question of civic/legal/moral overreach/breach but a matter of logistics, which, upon sufficient revision, will be able to cope with the enormity of scale? That is, it will be able to pry, peeve, snoop, spy, eavesdrop, peep into what goes on in the confines of our bedrooms once it can skillfully and successfully event-manage the theatre of surveillance after convincing us of its "smartness"?
That smartness will tell us that watching pornography or watching the documentary on 16 December Delhi gang rape, India's Daughter, or reading Wendy Doniger's The Hindus are all indecent and morally repugnant activities, which the ambassadors of hygiene - sexual/political/cultural/social/historical - want, or have made, gone. Gastronomical hygiene comes via banishing beef from our collective palates; environmental hygiene comes from shunting Greenpeace; while psychosexual sanitation, aka swachhata, comes from eschewing pornography from our virtual boudoirs.
Now Swapan Dasgupta has the unenviable task of cloaking the Modi-fied Centre's systemic assault on constitutionally enshrined ideas and ideals that make India under the garb of the evangelism that is "freeing us of the left-liberals". So we give him a good listen when he pegs the Centre's "ping porn pong" (to borrow a phrase from Mrs Funny Bones, Twinkle Khanna, manna from the liberal heaven of unalloyed wit, as it were) on a matter of "restoring its deviant status". As one of the chief explicators of Modi raj, Dasgupta, in a perplexing column in the Times of India on Saturday, August 8, wrote: "People cutting across the political divide see pornography as offensive, utterly distasteful and worthy of checks. … the battle is all about achieving an enlightened compromise between the existing social consensus and individual licence."
In other words, Dasgupta's enlightened compromise is again a matter of swachhata, of purity, hygiene and purge. The "dirty picture", which he does not want us to stand up for, because it is not worthy of it, is, therefore, not only "deviant", but also against the "family values and notions of common decencies".
Before I ask Dasgupta, who exactly will arbitrate and execute this "enlightened compromise", it would do well to draw water from the well of irony, which in India seems remarkably well-stocked in all seasons.
Just a day before Dasgupta's column was published, on Friday, August 8, cops carried out the utterly reviling and frankly illegal raid in Madh Island and Aksa regions of Mumbai, and rounded up 40 couples who had checked into the city's motels and shacks to steal a slice of privacy from the giant grind that is the commercial capital of the country. They were charged with public indecency, although they were engaging in intimacy in the privacy of the bought time and space of the motel rooms. They were harassed, intimidated, violated, slapped and humiliated beyond measure in the name of decency and hygienic moral values.
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| Madh Island raid. [Photo courtesy: Mid-day.com] |
It is here that I return to the question of the bedroom and the Rohatgi's/Centre's proclamation that it cannot be present in everyone's bedrooms. Every single word in this staggering confession/bare-faced lie forebodes exactly what the government denies: that it cannot become a totalitarian state. For it is well on its way to becoming one.
Where does the bedroom begin and where does it end? Were the couples, who were hounded out of the small time hotels of Mumbai, not in a bedroom of sort? If by bedroom, we imagine a private space of comfort, leisure, resting and site of sexual and other forms of personal, consensual activity, who has dominion on that but ourselves? And did not the state, in the garb of its henchmen, the police, violate that very sanctum sanctorum, that private space, by breaching it, in the case of both Madh Island raids and porn ban? If the gateways to our bedrooms are opened and closed by remote controls from a pugnacious Centre, if we have to have sex, eat, breathe, write, read, read out, watch a film, listen to a song, or not in each case, under the oppressive gaze of an all-seeing, all-knowing judgmental eye, then how free are we? Who is defining our bedrooms for us? Who wants to have threesomes of surveillance with you and me in the innermost recesses of our homes, refuges, bodies and minds?
In the acclaimed German film, The Lives of Others (2006), filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, shows how the Stasi, or the secret police of GDR (German Democratic Republic, or East Germany in casual parlance), monitors the private chambers and bedrooms of artists and intellectuals to sniff out and nix dissidence in the bud. The bedroom becomes the site of danger because it is here that we reveal ourselves, literally unclothing. That unclothing is a form of unmasking, a showing to ourselves and our loved ones what we really are. It is here that "deviancy" that Dasgupta so fears and condemns, attains a kind of nebulous, hesitant expression. So-called deviancies, which are legal and widely accepted in many modern democracies, but crimes in our country. Such as homosexual love, or even a penchant for pornography, which banned and half-unbanned, would dangerously lurk in the alleys of being almost criminal.
What Rohatgi and Dasgupta fail to grasp is the citizen is a sovereign political and sexual being, whose sexual politics they need not preside over. This is the basis of Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Indian Constitution, where certain fundamental rights are enshrined to safeguard the citizens from the vagaries of the State. The State/Law is not above the sovereignty and integrity of the Citizen - the social/civic/political/sexual being in a philosophical sense, although Article 19 is subject to "morality and decency", Article 21 subject to procedure established by law. But that is legalese to prevent misuse; not violate the basic freedoms common to all citizens. Any notions of "common decency", therefore, must be updated and upgraded to include the emerging patterns of sexual, social and political engagement, aided by technological innovations. These patterns are never static or stagnant: therefore, the "endurance" of some that Dasgupta mentions is basically a majoritarian impulse that this government harnesses to its utmost. Moreover, what about the teeming millions who do not even have access to the luxury of bedrooms? What about the marginalised who don't have a roof overhead or a sanctum sanctorum to hide their private engagements within? As we see, what constitutes the bedroom is a pliable and stretchable idea, just like common decencies. Putting a premium on either/both, therefore, infringes on the idea of freedom itself. Instead, the premium should be on bodily autonomy, and the expressions thereof.
That said, my bedroom is nobody's business, as long as my business is consensual, with a fellow adult. And my bedroom isn't your newsroom; it's not a source of information that you can use against me - to morph me, control me, mould me, stop me, or deny me. If there's anything that is indecent, it's this state-engineered intrusion, this unwarranted governmental voyeurism in the name of morality, national security, hygiene. The state is the pervert here, not I. This technological Talibanisation, this Orwellian nightmare of the indigenous variety, you will not shove down my sexually and intellectually sovereign throat.