What-the-Farooq!

Sandip RoyFirst they said there were no gays in India. All this gay-shay business was the corrupting influence of the decadent West. Now it turns out we are headed to all-gay all-the-time in India. That’s according to no less an expert than Dr. Farooq Abdullah.Dr. Abdullah is worried about the growing uneven sex ratio in India. “The day is not far when there will be no girls to marry and we’ll all become gays. That might happen,” he said while addressing the Indian Water Forum 2011.Gays all over India are probably bristling with indignation. But consider this. You could also say Dr. Abdullah just made a left-handed case for gay marriage if his big fear is there will be no girls left to marry.It could happen. Census 2011 says that in 2001 there were 927 girls aged 0-6 for every 1000 boys. In 2011 that number has dropped to 914. So by the most simple arithmetic, unless we are going into any five-for-one happy hour Draupadi solutions, we are left with 86 boys with no girls to marry.  Ergo there’s room for at least 43 gay-by-circumstance couples. (And if some of the women are lesbians, then there’s room for more.)[caption id="attachment_426" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Fayaz Kabli/Reuters"][/caption]Now if Dr. Abdullah is worried there won’t be enough children, that’s another matter altogether. I am not sure where the children are going to come from. But gay no longer means childless. According to the 2000 U.S. Census gays and lesbians raise four percent of all adopted children in the U.S. In the U.S., there are 2,70,000 children living with same-sex couples. And that’s with same-sex marriage still being illegal in most of America.Of course you still need women to have those children even if two dads raise them. Are we going to have to outsource surrogate mothers?But really, that’s not the problem. In India, it seems everything, always, boils down to marriage. Little girls are dying. Their numbers are dropping. That is the crisis. And it seems that the only way to slap people to attention is to say “Who are your laadla betas going to MARRY now? Each other?”I am sure Dr. Abdullah means well.  But you know what, we aren’t going to solve the girl-child crisis in India by raising the spectre of the Big Fat Gay Indian Wedding. Lakshmi ChaudhryAsked about Abdullah's off-the-cuff remark, the Congress party spokesman, Manish Tewari, coyly demurred, "Keeping in mind the kind of question that you have asked and the person who you have mentioned and his talent and dignity, I would not like to dignify it with a response." Really? Well, allow me to do the honours.The real problem with esteemed Dr. Abdullah's formulation – no women, eeks, we’ll all turn gay – is not the spectre of the big gay love-in, but his assumption that women are only good for one thing: sex. According to him, female foeticide threatens not merely the hallowed institution of marriage, but the ability of Indian men to be true men. An achievement that presumably requires the presence of the female body.That Sandip helpfully acknowledges our other valuable function, i.e. making babies, is hardly cause for celebration. In either case, we women are just the sum of our most basic parts, vagina, uterus et al. The problem with gay men is that they are... men. A skydiving sex ratio? Excellent, how about you let us gay chaps get married? Not content with starving us girls to death in the name of high-fashion, my gay friends are now cheerfully embracing our threatened extinction to score witty debating points about gay marriage. To which I say: bah, humbuggery!Here's a radical thought: how about saving women's lives simply because they are women – even those who are no good for sex or babies? As for that big fat gay wedding, welcome to the happy, shiny world of marital rape and zero alimony. You guys will first have to figure out which one of you gets to play, in Bapuji's immortal words, the “Lower House”.