This article showed up in this morning’s newspaper.

Please note that the black bar is from me. The newspaper actually gave this guy’s phone number. After arresting and publicly humiliating him. For being gay, and having a meeting with other gay people.
I know people here in India read this, feel free to leave a comment and tell me what’s going on… is there really that much prejudice here?

I sent the following letter to the paper:

To:mumbailetters@hindustantimes.com
From: me

Hello, my name is Ryan Estrada.
I am an American citizen living in Mumbai.
After reading so many articles in the Hindustan times about gay marriages in other countries, positive messages in homosexuality themed films, and other such public displays of respect toward fellow human beings, I was shocked to read the article in this morning’s paper entitled :”Gay club unearthed, 4 arrested”

It’s not just that a group of people were arrested and publicly humiliated for being homosexuals. It’s not just that after reading so many articles about rape, murder and corruption in India, I find that police are using their resources to conduct sting operations to enforce people’s lifestyles. It’s not just that the article in your paper is entirely on the side of the police. It’s not just that you not only show the crime they are accused of as a horrible thing, but publicly insult them for things like “chatting with gay people on an internet website” They are so many things in that article that show a complete lack of respect for other human beings.

But what really disgusts me to the core is that you chose to publish the accused person’s personal phone number in the article. What possible reason would there be to do this, besides to give bigots a means of contacting this person. Even if he has deactivated this number to keep the certain onslaught of prank calls, threats and angry messages, this gives people a means of obtaining more information, like a home address, and makes hate crimes inevitable. The police have already sentenced this man to a jail term, now your newspaper has sentenced him to be humiliated, beaten up, and if someone out there is sick enough, murdered.

I believe you may have just earned yourself a few more headlines.

—-Update!—-

A very edited version of my letter appeared in the paper today, and was given the title “Not so gay”

For those who were wonderingin the comments what these people’s crime was, since the word ‘racket’ was used, rest assured that the editor of this newspaper doesn’t know what the word ‘racket’ means. The word appears in about six headlines per day. These people were just arrested for being gay.

But it’s not like the police’s attitudes are archaic or anything. There’s an article in the paper today about women being persecuted for Witchcraft. Oh, wait…..

And if you’re wondering if this is just a really conservative paper, the letter underneath, titled ’spank them’, is in reference to an article which stated public fornication is just part of the culture and police have no right to punish people.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 4:11 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.