Seeing how our politics has failed us time and again, it is easy to understand why people get carried away and look for saviours in anyone with an attractive enough message, and the recent by-elections have proved the point again. What I fail to get though is why there remains a fair number of those who believe the only way forward is to go backwards. Perhaps it is a sign of a patent unwillingness to engage with the facts, for I cannot but point out once again that since 2006 and the emasculation of the monarchy, Nepal has become a society much more accommodating of all kinds of differences than could ever be imagined earlier.

It is a sign of how far things have changed that this tolerance extends to sexual minorities as well, and it still amazes people from around the world that this little corner of Asia was able to shake off the entrenched conservatism without much of an ado. Kudos to our Supreme Court for leading the way with its landmark decision in 2007 which declared outright, “[W]e hold that it is an inherent right of an adult to have marital relations with another adult with her/his free consent and according to her/his will.”

Legal sanction

The Court also asked the government to recognise the third gender and conduct a survey of the country’s laws that discriminate against the LGBT community while forming a committee to look into how same-sex relationships could be granted legal sanction. Some of that came through and some have not, particularly with the 2017 Civil Code defining marriage to refer to heterosexual unions only. But, as noted by Kyle Knight, a researcher with Human Rights Watch and perhaps one who has most keenly watched Nepal’s evolution towards becoming more LGBT-friendly, “Nepal became only the 10th country in the world to enshrine specific protections for LGBT people in its constitution.”

That is a feat we can be proud of. Especially with the ascendance of right-wing nationalism coinciding with the increase in homophobia the world over; from countries in Eastern Europe following the example of Putin’s Russia to Africa where Uganda has emerged as the leader in the repression of sexual minorities, and the “red states” in the United States vying to outdo each other in anti-LGBT legislation. China under strongman Xi Jinping is becoming increasingly intolerant of gays (although such intolerance extends to all levels of society). In India, in an ongoing case that has asked the Supreme Court to recognise same-sex marriage, the Hindu nationalist government has countered that the case reflects “mere urban elitist views for social acceptance” and that is only an “urban elitist concept far removed from the social ethos of the country”.

Misguided as it may be, the Indian government’s riposte was a surprise since it did not blame the “decadent” West for the rise of homosexuality as would be its wont. The West does get the rap all the time—Vladimir Putin has termed LGBT rights and the West pushing them as “pure Satanism” while African states like Uganda and Ghana claim to be protecting “African values” from the West in their attacks on the LGBT community.

Our own Maoists created somewhat of a stir soon after they came above ground in 2006. Dev Gurung, currently the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre), declared confidently, “Under Soviet rule and when China was still very much a communist state, there were no homosexuals in the Soviet Union or China. Now [that] they are moving towards capitalism, homosexuals may have arisen there as well. So homosexuality is a product of capitalism. Under socialism this kind of problem does not exist.”

The irony is that the American right blames the left for advancing LGBT rights, and leftists like Gurung are cocksure homosexual behaviour resulted from our encounter with the West. Gurung is probably unaware that sodomy laws from the Tsarist era were discarded by the Bolsheviks in 1922 until Stalin brought them back 12 years later while Mao’s China just pretended homosexuality did not exist.

As usual, the truth is far from what can pierce through an ideological prism. There is growing recognition that views towards sexuality were quite lenient both to the north and south of us. Temple sculptures in India depicting homosexual acts are only too common as are accounts of historical figures in such relationships. In China, the term “the passion of the cut sleeve” is used as a euphemism to indicate intimacy between two men, originating in a story going back to the years before the Common Era.

In fact, the evidence is strong everywhere that it was the Western, Christian colonialists who took a sour view of non-heterosexual sex and went about criminalising it everywhere. That is the trend even today where American evangelicals have been instrumental in creating an atmosphere of hate towards gay sex in many African countries, and the rulers have gone along since antagonism towards the LGBT earns them votes.

Nepali attitudes

This brings us to a heartfelt piece some time ago in Kantipur by the well-known former government official, Bhojraj Pokharel. Entitled, “Yes, our son is gay”, it is worth a close read. While one can guess at the kind of emotions he (and his wife) would have wrestled with upon first learning about their son’s sexual orientation, it is clear what made it easier for Pokharel to accept his son was that he himself was at the forefront of making Nepal a more inclusive state in his role as the Chief Election Commissioner in the mid-2000s. As for the reason he went public with the article, he writes, “When someone considered a societal leader speaks the truth, it can provide relief to those still suffering.”

I did wonder at the reaction to Pokharel’s piece and went through the internet to get a sense of it. Apart from one or two snide remarks, his own Twitter and Facebook entries were full of praise, not only for the courage Pokharel had shown, but also the love he and his wife were able to shower on their son and his partner. I then went through Kantipur’s Twitter and Facebook pages carrying the article to see how the trolls were behaving. Surprisingly, there, too, the support was quite unequivocal. Of course, there were some nasty comments, but on the whole, it was quite revealing where we have reached as a society.

Not long after Pokharel’s article, there appeared a similar one in the Indian Express by Vivek Katju, who, like Pokharel, used to be a high-ranking bureaucrat. He is also the father of Arundhati Katju, who, with her partner Menaka Guruswamy, succeeded in persuading the Indian Supreme Court in 2018 to decriminalise homosexuality. Like Pokharel, Katju recalls his own experience coming to terms with his daughter’s sexuality. “The journey has made me a better person and a better Hindu,” he writes, “because, for me, especially now, the essence of my great faith is to shun dogma and accept as equal, in the truest sense of the term, life and orientations and love and unions in their infinite varieties and forms.”

Substitute “better Hindu” with “better Muslim” or “better Christian” or even “better atheist”—for the benefit of our comrades—and one begins to understand the joy of being accepting of differences in all their manifestations. That has been the true gift of republican Nepal.