PINK SLIP An exit so queer
Straight Indian men are masquerading as homosexuals for an asylum in the first world. Vikram Doctor on the consequences Gay for Pay is a well-known concept in the world of porn. It refers to straight men — or men who say they are straight — who take part in gay porn movies simply for the cash. Now add to the glossary Gay for Getaway, which is apparently what many Punjab da puttars are doing in order to flee their fields of flowering mustard. According to media reports, pairs of men have been queuing up, hand in hairy hand, outside the consulates of countries like the UK, Belgium and Canada that now give legal recognition to same-sex partnerships, to claim that they are a gay couple and since that's not acceptable in India, please could these countries let them in to settle down and marry. Lest one imagine that Punjab's green revolution is now being overtaken by a pink one, it's a different story outside. One man said he had a girlfriend who knew this was just a ruse to get abroad, and once he was settled there, they would marry. Another said his father had put him up to it. Using gay marriage to get abroad is a new one. An example of how quick the emigration business is to cotton on to changes in the law abroad. But trying to use sexuality as a way to get asylum has been going on for years. Aditya Bandopadhyay, a lawyer and gay rights activist from Delhi, recalls being asked some years ago by an Italian lawyer to help with the case of an Indian man who arrived in Italy and was asking for asylum because he feared persecution back home. "I got into a correspondence with this man. But after a point, I became aware his story was just a concoction." There are stories of straight Indian men in places like New York who go to gay South Asian parties and take pictures of themselves with drag queens and the more obviously gay men there to use as evidence of their homosexuality in asylum applications. (Curiously, there are few cases of lesbian asylum seekers when it might be imagined that facing both patriarchal and homophobic pressures, there should be more. This could reflect how much harder it is for women to flee.) Stories of fake asylum seekers anger gay activists based in India. Partly it's the irritation of seeing the real problems of homosexuals in India being made use of by people with no interest in gay issues, and who may very well be homophobic themselves. But even more, there's the knowledge that such cases muddy the waters for gays and lesbians who might genuinely need asylum. Bandopadhyay had another case where the son of a powerful business family had come out when he was abroad. "His family lured him back to India and took away his passport and locked him up at home." Finally, one day when the family was out at a wedding, he managed to escape, secure his passport and flee the country for Bangkok, from where he got a visa to the UK. Once in London, he applied for asylum and with an affidavit from Bandopadhyay, got it. In a similar case, the father used his influence with the police to get them to harass his son and his boyfriend, again forcing them to contemplate asylum simply as a means of survival. At the Humsafar Trust, India's oldest gay rights group, Ashok Row Kavi has been dealing with such cases for the past 10 years. "Our position is that we will give an affidavit when there are legitimate grounds based on objective reality," he says. For example, in the case of an Indian man living in the UK with his partner for many years, Humsafar, knowing the case was genuine, gave affidavits to support his application for citizenship. On the other hand, Row Kavi recalls a case from around the time the BJP-led NDA government came to power. The US authorities asked Humsafar if they would support the case of an affluent gay man who had apparently applied for asylum on the grounds that the right-wing government was killing homosexuals. Row Kavi was shocked at this unnecessary politicisation of the issue. "After all, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (used to penalise homosexuality) was not created by the BJP or the Shiv Sena but is an old colonial law that needs to be struck down by legal means," he says. In addition, the application seemed to negate what groups like Humsafar stood for. "As we were fighting against these laws and against violence against gay people, we could not endorse a stand where we would advise people to flee the country instead of fighting against forces which sought to oppress us," says Row Kavi, firmly. At Human Rights Watch, a New York-based global human rights NGO, Scott Long, director of their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights programme, is well aware of the difficulties of this debate. Local groups like Humsafar are in a tough position in matters of asylum, having to spend their limited resources to evaluate individual cases in far-off countries. "Most are understandably anxious neither to mitigate the problems in their homelands, nor to misrepresent the seriousness," he says. Long says that countries that allow asylum for reasons of sexuality have a two-fold requirement: proving your fear of persecution and that you're actually a member of the group in question. The problem is that what constitutes proof can be ambiguous because persecution has a broad definition. "Persecution can also mean a threat to your liberty, bodily integrity, or security," Long says. "Being forced to remain in the closet and conceal an important aspect of one's self, for instance, is arguably a form of persecution." Yet asylum authorities could point out that many gay men are living openly, if never quite easily, in India as proof that persecution doesn't exist. The second problem he says is that identity can be culturally variable so that what constitutes being homosexual in Bangladesh can differ considerably from the West. Class and other factors also come into play. The only constant is presumably same-sex attraction and that can be hard to prove in an administrative situation. Countries that are very tolerant of homosexuality for their own citizens are becoming less willing to grant asylum to gay people, perhaps from imagined fears of being swamped by queer folk. In the Netherlands, for example, one of the first countries to allow gay marriage, immigration minister Rita Verdonk tried sending gay Iranian asylum seekers back. Post 9/11 and other recent problems, the climate has soured considerably. Perhaps one other point could be drawn from these confusions. The reason they exist at all is the continuing presence of an archaic law like Section 377 on the books — and one which remains a very potent threat as is shown by cases like the industrialist's son harassed by the police, at his father's behest, for being gay. As long as the law remains, India falls into the category of countries willing to persecute its own citizens for traits inherent and unchangeable in them, and that is grounds for asylum. Gays for Getaway are perhaps an amusing story, but the reason why they can try to pull off their scam is not. -- www.gaybombay.info ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get to your groups with one click. 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