In an interaction at IIT-B’s annual festival Mood Indigo, former Supreme Court Justice Markandey Katju said that while he believed that Section 377 should be deleted, he also felt that all the hoopla around gay rights was to divert people’s attention from more essential issues. He also attacked Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal for not being transparent and called Gandhiji and Mohammad Ali Jinnah “agents of the British”.
Speaking on the contentious Section 377 that criminalises gay sex, Justice Katju said, “I’m of the opinion that section 377 should be deleted. There has to be freedom for everyone. However, while I give full support to the freedom, at the same time gay relations are unnatural. In nature there is a powerful force which says that the species should continue or the human race will die. And the only way to continue this species is when a man has sex with a woman, if a man has sex with a man, babies won’t be born and the human race will eventually die. You can’t deny nature and its forces and on the Internet I read that 99.9 per cent people are straight only 0.1 per cent are gay,” adding, “So all this shouting and screaming about gay rights is simply to divert people’s attention from more important problems like poverty, malnutrition, price rise etc.”
While discussing the Partition of India, he called Gandhi the “main culprit who injected religion into politics and divided the nation”. He also termed Gandhi and Jinnah as British agents. Later, he added Netaji Subhash Bose and Rabindranath Tagore to that list. “All kinds of myths have been created around Gandhi, Tagore and Bose. They were mere British agents . The beginning of an arms struggle had started in India in the beginning of 20th century by the great Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad etc. That’s when the British brought in Gandhi who diverted the genuine British struggle and brought in harmless channels like Satyagraha so that the British interests were not hurt. 1947 had got nothing to do with Gandhi.
India got independence because in the Second World War the Germans attacked the British and they almost conquered Britain, who then sought help from America. America, of course, wanted its prize as well.
They told the British to open the Indian market for investment and demanded a share in the Indian pie. So 1947 was an opening of the Indian market to America and had nothing to do with Gandhi, “ he said, urging the IIT students to use their common sense while pointing out that no one ever gave away an empire without a fight.
He didn’t mince words while slamming both Kejriwal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and said that the younger generation was following Kejriwal and Modi like rats followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin. “Kejriwal keeps shouting about imandaari and lacks transparency within his own system. I don’t vote because I know my vote doesn’t count only the Yadav, Kurmi, Brahmin votes banks are taken into account as the country,” he said.
He also added that he was not totally against the death penalty and that it was a deterrent. He pointed out that he had given an earlier judgment that said that those who are involved in honour killings must be given a death sentence. “Death penalties should be given to strike fear in the minds of barbarians. It is certainly a deterrent. What I’m trying to do is get people to think rationally and combat backward ideas,” he said.
