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Delhi murders reveal bias against gays
August 20, 2004
New Delhi - It had all the elements of an enthralling murder mystery: naked and
near-naked bodies of two lovers, pools of blood, multiple stabwounds and sexual
adventure gone horribly wrong at a posh Delhi address.
So it was to be expected that the local media would splash the double murders
of Pushkin Chandra, a well-to-do 38-year-old project development officer with
USAID, and his lover, a poorer youth identified as Kuldeep.
But what has incensed rights activists, social commentators and gay groups is
that far from focusing on the savagery of the incident, front page media
reports honed in on the fact the victims were homosexuals.
"Queer murder in Delhi," said The Times of India. "Double murder outs Delhi's
gay culture," said the Hindustan Times.
Reports went into minute details of the murder scene but laid particular stress
on the fact that pornographic pictures of naked men and men dressed as women
were found in Chandra's room.
The son of a senior civil servant and a product of the prestigious Doon school,
Chandra was discovered in his bathroom on the morning of August 14 lying naked
with his throat slit and hands and legs tied.
Kuldeep was found dressed in a pair of Bermuda shorts and a vest lying dead on
a bed in an adjoining room. His throat, too, had been slit. Police said both
men had been subjected to "frenzied" stabbing.
In their initial comments, police said there were indications that Chandra and
Kuldeep had been killed out of anger when they tried to force one or more men
to have sex with them. Another theory was that Chandra was blackmailing the
person or people who killed him.
By midweek police had changed their tune, saying that in view of the large
quantity of goods missing from the murder scene, including a car, laptop
computer and mobile phone, it seemed robbery was the motive.
Police theories aside, as far as the media was concerned the killings occurred
because the two men were homosexuals and had drifted into Delhi's sordid
underbelly where sex with strangers is commonplace and robbery and murder to be
expected.
The Asian Age commented on a "shocking" rise in the number of homosexuals in
Delhi alongside a report showing the "sexual profile" of Delhi in which
homosexuals are lumped together with eunuchs and commercial sex workers.
In the days that followed the discovery of the bodies, news reports were
fixated on Delhi's gay community, mapping out their "cruising places",
detailing the surge of HIV/AIDS cases in the capital among gay men and how
homosexuals lurk in darkened corners of the city at night along with smack
addicts ready to offer or receive easy sexual gratification.
According to gay rights activist Shaleen Rakesh, the media reports unmasked the
widespread intolerance for homosexuals in India, where consensual gay sex is
still an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
"The reporting was outrageous, it was not even relevant to this murder," Rakesh
told AFP.
"What the newspapers are doing is highlighting that the victims were gay --
this has nothing to do with the case ... They are fuelling homophobia."
"The murder was like any other. What difference does it make if a person is
gay?"
Social commentator Namita Bhandare was equally scathing about the reporting on
the case. "The media haven't stopped at mere crime reporting," Bhandare wrote
in a newspaper article this week. "One isolated murder has become symptomatic
of the entire gay community.
"The life and death of one of the victims is now being used to construct an
identikit of gay men in Delhi: they live dangerously, they cruise the streets
in search of poor boys to exploit, they haunt websites, chatrooms and parks in
search of easy prey. They're obsessed with porn," Bhandare wrote.
"Suddenly every stereotype that the gay community has been fighting for years
has come home to roost."
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Gays,
male prostitutes under police scanner
8-18-2004
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