National Affairs

Barbarians at the Gate

Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam cautions against relaxing the ethical code regulating sexual behaviour.

The Delhi High Court’s judgment “reading down” Section 377, which in effect decriminalises homosexual acts between consenting individuals, has raised fears of an invasion of a different kind.

A massive army of Barbarians is standing at the gates of the citadel called India, pounding it furiously with catapults and siege machines, trying to break it open. Once the flood gates open we will be overwhelmed by the fearsome force of the international sex industry.

I must thank my friend Santosh Bhartiya, journalist and former MP, for bringing some of the terrifying truths regarding the global sex industry and its extraordinary reach.

He says (being a journalist he must be knowing a lot about it) that nobody can stand up to the might of the global arms industry and the global psychotropic drugs industry. These drugs change the state of consciousness and come under different scientific categories of tranquilisers, sedatives, hallucinogens and anti-depressives.

Potentially developed for therapeutic purposes, they are being permanently abused by hundreds of millions of people as “entertainment” drugs, using them for creating a temporary high, or for a tranquil, calm feeling. Once hooked on to these drugs it is very difficult to deaddict and rehabilitate someone. Dependence on most of these mind-altering drugs are more difficult to deaddict than alcoholism. This massive global criminal empire is being run by international mafia.

Similar is the power and reach of the arms industry that has taken away the resources which could have fed nearly 900 million hungry people of the world. The sex industry, too, is not different. This global industry is expanding and is worth trillions of dollars. Like other multinationals, this industry, too, is trying to gatecrash into India.

Already we have massive sex industry hubs in Philippines, Thailand and Brazil. This industry is eying India as the next biggest market. In universities, mass media and other sections of society that can influence opinion and attitudes, the industry is busy prying open the gates of public morality.

Recently students in Delhi’s Jamia Millia protested against a teacher openly propagating a homosexual life-style. It turned out that he was being funded by an NGO which, in turn, was funded by foreign interests. Indian society must be watchful if it wants its future generations to live in peace and tranquillity.

These developments have perturbed us so much that the Institute of Objective Studies, of which I am the chairman, organised a day-long seminar on August 4 at India Islamic Culture Centre.

Religious leaders of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists and Jains joined together at the seminar and pledged to protect our composite culture from being swamped by the global sex industry.

The HC judgement does not seem to have gone beyond the legal niceties to look into the machinations of the global sex industry, but our Union government should have known better. Our Union law minister was ill-advised to go on record praising the High Court judgment. That sounds like preparing the ground for legislating immorality in the days ahead. That’s a fearful prospect for the moral majority of India.

We have built our culture over millennia, and we had a culture even before much of the world was struggling in nomadic and early pastoral stages. We cannot afford to allow sexual predators to destroy our composite culture. The government, instead of buckling under international pressure, must stand firm if its constituent parties want to have another term in power.  g