Sexual justice

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Of the many parts of the Bharatiya Nyay Samhita (BNS), the new criminal code that is causing anxiety, one is Clause 69. To put it simplistically, it makes punishable by upto ten years of prison, sexual intercourse had through deceit, for instance through a false promise of marriage. The instant response is alarm, that jilted women will use Clause 69 to vengefully persecute men.

However, the truth of the matter is that when it comes to sexual or relational matters, such laws are most often misused by parents, communities and the authorities in the service of social control. Take the example of POCSO, a law meant to protect children from sexual abuse. A large number of POCSO cases are filed by parents who oppose consensual teenage relationships, which even judges have noted - some queer, some inter-faith or inter-caste and some simply unacceptable because the idea of young people's sexuality is so harshly stigmatized in our culture.

Similar is the idea of love jihad, which imagines (Hindu) women as childlike beings without agency, misled by (Muslim) men and claims to protect women from this deceit, but is essentially used to police inter-faith relationships.

Earlier, Uttarakhand passed a law requiring those in a live-in relationship to register when it starts and ends. This also claimed to be meant to protect women in the wake of several grisly murders that happened to be in the context of live-in partners.

While claiming to protect women, these laws seek to control women and in fact all young people, on behalf of their families, communities and castes and frequently criminalise young men, especially those from vulnerable backgrounds. Yet the noise around such laws is always about how vengeful women will use them unfairly to harm "innocent" men, usually of more privileged backgrounds.

That we legislate to protect women from sexual betrayal but shrug away emotional betrayal points to an underlying sense that women have a "virtue" that must be protected. Their sexual selves exist only to serve the idea of marriage and reproduction. Anything outside that is wrong and ringed with fear, anxiety and therefore, often secrecy. When this is the ground on which many relationships take place, a confident consensuality is difficult and the chances of betrayal and unfairness higher. The question is, can law bring justice to this reality if a society does not reckon with the granular reality of relationships and desire?

As a society we do not acknowledge the individual's agency - the young person's most of all - when it comes to personal life. Parents expect to have a say in every aspect of their children's lives and choices, to constrain them to social roles and identities. They do not accept the right to privacy. Relationships in families may claim to be of love and care but are often also of emotional blackmail, scrutiny and outright force. With such attitudes cutting across social and systemic spaces, how do we develop a true acknowledgement and understanding of consent and consensuality?

Even our public conversation about sexuality flatly reduce sexual life to a binary of violence or liberation. So little acknowledges the layers of intimate life, that the complex choices, desires and journeys of individuals in the world of sex and love remain shrouded. What then is the possibility of a proper, grown-up conversations of ethics in relationships? And without those conversations, can laws hope to ensure sexual justice?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com