Who ‘framed’ Ramchandra Siras? Journalistic discourses of sexual citizenship in India

Abstract

In 2010, a professor in India was forcibly outed as gay and catapulted into a nationwide debate about LGBTQ rights in India. A textual analysis of prominent Indian English-language newspapers revealed the framing devices journalists used to report the case, unpacking how coverage essentialized gay identity, signified civil rights and citizenship, problematized notions of consent, complicated public/private demarcations of sexuality, and negotiated competing claims of morality. Journalistic discourse inevitably privileged dominant western neoliberal conceptions of sexuality, reducing sexual citizenship to a particular classed and gendered subject at the expense of a more expansive range of alternative sexualities in India.

Keywords

Indian newspapers LGBTQ issues in India news framing Ramchandra Siras sexual citizenship

Introduction

This study concerns a controversial forced outing case in India that became the center of a national debate about LGBTQ rights and the role of the state in regulating sexuality. The case remains in the contemporary news cycle as a catalyst for the Indian Supreme Court’s recent September 2018 overturning of a colonial-era law that criminalized homosexuality.

The story begins in February 2010 when a news crew forced itself into the house of a professor and filmed him in a sexual interaction with another man (Sheikh, 2014). These events occurred at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), a prestigious school in the north Indian town of Aligarh founded in 1875 on the combined principles of the British education system and Islamic traditions (Nazim, 2008). The professor – 64-year-old award-winning Marathi poet Ramchandra Siras (Asim, 2016; Sheikh, 2014) – was soon suspended by the university according to its position on homosexuality as immoral and antithetical to its mission (The Indian Express, 2010a) and forced to vacate his university-allotted quarters. These controversies gained national attention through the Indian media that followed Siras as he fought his suspension through the legal system. He won the case against AMU in April 2010 based on his right to privacy and was reinstated to his position at AMU (Sheikh, 2014). A few days later, however, he was found dead allegedly from being poisoned (Sheikh, 2014).

Siras’s story unfolded against the backdrop of a long-running debate over homosexuality in India. India has an active LGBTQ rights movement, and the 2018 decriminalization of gay sex was only its most recent milestone (The Times of India, 2018); the law that criminalized gay sex had once earlier been repealed in 2009 only to be reinstated in 2013 (Al Baset, 2012; Misra, 2009; Prakash, 2016). The events in the Siras case occurred during that first period of decriminalization; AMU’s actions against him, therefore, were illegal at the time. Homosexuality, however, carries a severe stigma in India regardless of its legal status (Singh, 2015). Asim (2016) highlights the larger structural forces within which the events at Aligarh took place, stating that ‘the AMU community has Prof Siras’ blood on its hands.’

Discourses surrounding Siras’s story and its meaning to those outside the heterosexual ‘norm’ in India have continued to percolate in the media; the first wave of coverage primarily concerned the case as it played out in the legal system, and the second wave focused on the cultural controversies that ensued following the 2016 release of a controversial Hindi-language film about the case called Aligarh (BBC News, 2016). Media coverage plays a crucial role in shaping attitudes towards sexual minority communities; research shows that news media have the ability to influence public perceptions about non-heterosexual people and shape democratic discourse in the minds of voters and legislators (Azad and Nayak, 2016; Chakrapani et al., 2007; Jawale, 2016; Misra, 2009). Therefore, this study aims to uncover the frames used to construct the narrative of Siras’s story in India, specifically through its English-language newspapers. To begin, we review the current legal and cultural climate toward LGBTQ communities in India before discussing the impact of framing gay issues in the news.

Legal, political and cultural contexts: Sexual minorities in India

Queer identities in India take many different forms. They can refer to the indigenous hijra or the third-gender or cross-dresser, signify an invasive foreign concept, or simply connote a secondary issue (Mitra, 2010). Historically, the idea of a third gender has existed since ancient times as is evident from ancient Indian sculptures and Hindu texts such as the Mahabharata and the Kamasutra (Chakrapani et al., 2007; Jawale, 2016; Malik, 2013). This term can refer to others like ‘eunuch,’ ‘transgender’ (khusras), ‘hijra,’ ‘kothi,’ ‘chhakka,’ ‘hermaphrodite,’ ‘genderqueer,’ ‘intersex,’ ‘transsexual,’ ‘aravani,’ ‘jagappa,’ ‘cross-dresser’ (zenana), and ‘Shiv-Shakthi’ (Gairola, 2017: 99). Urdu poetry that expressed same-sex desires dates back to before the creation of modern India in 1947 (Kole, 2007).

In recent times, much of the discourse around homosexuality has revolved around Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Established by the British in 1860 (Bhaskaran, 2002; Misra, 2009), the law deemed voluntary ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman, or animal’ (Bhaskaran, 2002: 3) a crime. Activists argued for the exclusion of consensual gay sex from Section 377 based on the Indian constitution’s values of dignity, privacy, right to life, personal liberty, and equality (Misra, 2009; Sheikh, 2014). This re-interpretation of the law did not occur without a backlash, particularly from religious groups (Kole, 2007; Misra, 2009; Sheikh, 2014).

The repercussions of these legal, political and cultural tensions on non-heterosexual communities in India have been manifold. Sheikh attributes the ‘narrative of perversity’ (2014: 114) in most national discourses about homosexuality to Section 377. Non-heterosexual people and their supporters are subject to harassment, often by their own families, the police, and criminals (Chakrapani et al., 2007; Chatterjee, 2014; Jawale, 2016; Misra, 2009). This limits access to employment, education, healthcare, and housing (Azad and Nayak, 2016; Chatterjee, 2014; Jawale, 2016; Malik, 2013); in extreme cases, it leads to human rights violations such as jail time, hefty fines, rape, blackmail, and even death (Azad and Nayak, 2016; Chakrapani et al., 2007; Chatterjee, 2014; Jawale, 2016; Malik, 2013).

Thus, scholars caution that the decriminalization of gay sex acts cannot be equated with depathologization. For instance, Maureemootoo argues that the Siras case symbolizes ‘postcolonial residues that haunt India’s contemporary cultural and political scapes’ (2014: 108) as tensions between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity.’ At the center of these conflicts are what delineates ‘acceptable’ from ‘unacceptable’ sexual behavior. The debates around decriminalizing and defining ‘sexual mores in (post)colonial India’ are a form of ‘colonial mimicry of masculinity that was entrenched in early twentieth-century nationalist movements’ (Maureemootoo, 2014: 108). Moreover, Singh (2015) explains how Section 377 distinguished between sex acts performed in public and private spaces – it decriminalized the former but had limited impact on the latter, which includes the home and the workplace. These issues are highlighted in Siras’s story as he was expelled for homosexual behavior at his workplace and residence, both of which fell under the domain of his employer, a public university, during a period of decriminalization. Al Baset’s analysis of the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment revealed similar discourses about the collision between public and private spaces, declaring that privacy did not ‘ensure inclusion into the moral public’ (Al Baset, 2012: 101). Similarly, Mandal raised concerns about how the judgment associated privacy with the institution of marriage and would create ‘a hierarchy between those who had sex in private (“good sex”) and those who would like to or could only have sex in public spaces such as parks, bath houses and public lavatories (“bad sex”)’ (Mandal, 2009: 533).

Chakrapani et al. visualize a structural solution to the injustices suffered by sexual minorities in India, recommending that ‘institutional contexts of discrimination and oppression; sociocultural constructions and expectations regarding gender roles and norms, Indian male sexuality and masculinity; and a critical understanding of Indian history and postcolonial influences’ (2007: 362) be addressed. As media representations are necessarily rooted in and shape larger hegemonic social structures, this project attempts to heed this call by examining news discourses as part of the structural and institutional contexts that shape public understandings of LGBTQ issues and communities.

Globalism and expanding queer representations in India

Emerging work has begun to focus on queer-themed representations in Indian media, particularly during the period of temporary decriminalization from 2009–2013. Scholars cite an expanding Indian queer mediascape (Singh, 2017) during this period and have used this work to explore the role of globalization and neoliberalism in the construction of the ‘gay’ citizen, particularly the dominance of western and American discourses in determining sexual citizenship (Bakshi and Sen, 2012; Pullen, 2007, 2010). To unpack these representations in news discourses, we rely on the important work on globalism and postcolonial theory in media studies (Parameswaran, 2002, 2008; Shome, 2016). Postcolonial theory is a ‘complex and contested project’ that developed to examine the political, economic and cultural impacts of colonialism ‘that persist in shaping the meanings and practices’ of indigenous and colonized peoples (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011: 61). Postcolonial media scholars examine the ways in which institutions, including media representations, orientalize (Said, 1979) and ‘stigmatize indigenous groups in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as “primitive” while moralizing Western-style development as universal and inevitable’ (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011: 61). An important part of this work, then, is in rejecting binary oppositional and hierarchical categories of western/non-western, local/global, and center/periphery (Lindlof and Taylor, 2011).

Intersecting the work of globalism and postcolonialism, neoliberalism is a social and political project that extends free market principles and corporate structures into the wider social and cultural spheres; it ‘normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life’ (Brown, 2003), emphasizing consumerism, privatization and individualism over collectivism and the common good. Neoliberalism has intensified in Indian contexts since the mid 1980s, seeking an ‘entrepreneurial subject, one who is actively making choices to maximize one’s economic interest within a free market economy’ (Dasgupta and Dasgupta, 2018: 933).

Neoliberal notions of consumer-citizenship, personal agency and ‘transnational human rights rhetoric’ have been at the center of LGBTQ equal rights campaigns and movements (Bhaskaran, 2013: 18). Queer scholars have problematized the notion of sexuality as bound, stable, essentialized, and classifiable – and able to be revealed and made visible. As a result, ‘non-Western or nontraditional sexualities,’ conclude Schoonover and Galt (2016: 12), ‘may not always fare well when viewed a through a Western lens of visibility’. Pressures of globalization confront queer identities in India, whereby ‘existing multiplicities of queer sexualities such as hijras, kothis, kinnars, panthis, jogtas, dangas, alis, double-deckers, chhakkas, and dhuranis are commonly clubbed together by HIV/AIDS activists as LGBTs thus redefining existing sexual identities/practices in a predefined Western mould of “performance”’ (Kole, 2007: 13). The hegemonic discourses problematically position heterosexuality at the center, working as an ‘invisible norm,’ defining other forms of sexual expression against it in narrow and fixed ways (King, 2009: 274). Metropolitan LGBTQ culture in India is now associated with ‘transnational patterns of conspicuous consumption and display’ (Dutta, 2012: 123), mirroring contemporary metropolitan gay culture in the West with its emphasis on visibility and identification as its ‘most stable, socially recognized, politically assimilated and economically productive expression of homosexuality’ (Mowlabocus, 2007: 64).

These tensions often cause many in India to view sexuality as a ‘frivolous, bourgeois issue’ (Jawale, 2016: 408) – a western construct – of interest to the Indian elite who have the privilege of an English education and access to western media (Kole, 2007). These class distinctions color the contemporary Indian LGBTQ movement, with its elite globalized members policing the behaviors of traditional sexual minorities in India, a ‘pedagogical training into citizenship’ (Dutta, 2012: 128) and middle-class society. In addition, traditional forms of non-heterosexual expressions, such as practicing same-sex sexual relations without identifying as being gay, are excluded from the umbrella labeling of LGBTQ groups (Kole, 2007). This process is further complicated by differences in class, gender performance, region, and language; rendering a homonormativity that Al Baset cautions against as ‘another form of upper-caste male hegemony’ (2018: 13). At the same time, Mandal argues that the 2009 Delhi High Court judgment opened up the privilege of the private space to people other than heterosexual, same-caste, monogamous married couples (Mandal, 2009: 539).

Queer representation has been addressed in Hindi language films like Fire, Bombay Boys, The Pink Mirror, Sins, Gandu, Hide and Seek, Unfreedom, Margarita with a Straw, and Angry Goddesses (Gairola, 2018). The topic has also inspired films in other parts of the country, such as Mitraa, Chitrangada, Aarekti Premer Galpo, Mitrachi Goshta, Randu Penkuttikal, and Sancharram (Medium, 2017; Menon, 2016). Dasgupta and Bakshi (2018) especially recognize the influence of neoliberalism in the life of iconic Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh who came out as queer and also associated himself with queer subjects in films. Hindi films, many of which are based on passionate same-sex masculine friendships (Dasgupta and Gokulsing, 2014), especially attract much attention. Many older traditional Hindi films that portray same-sex intimacies like Sholay, Pakeezah, Mughal-e-Azam, and Razia Sultan have also been made queer over time (Schoonover and Galt, 2016). While queer subjects have become more visible in Hindi films (Bakshi and Sen, 2012) – ‘erotically intimate wives, queer children, incestuous relatives, brutal rapes and hushed sexual liaisons between men’ (Gairola, 2018: 54) – analysis of films like Dostana and Kal Ho Na Ho indicates ‘a tolerance for queer desires but eventually establishes the inevitability of heterosexuality’ (Dasgupta, 2012: 10). Singh (2017) argues that contemporary Indian media representations through the form of advertising messages – one gay matrimonial advertisement featuring a gay couple and an ethnic apparel advert featuring a lesbian couple – ‘demonstrate how the Indian family is emerging as an important arbiter of queer relationality’ (2017: 721). The internet and new media, too, are emerging as safe public spaces for the articulation of queer discourse that challenges heteronormativity (Dasgupta, 2014; Pullen, 2007, 2010); Gairola uses the term ‘cybergaysian’ (2017: 98) to refer to those Indians who identify as queer and use new media to form alliances at the intersection of queer sexuality and technology.

Research, however, indicates that in India and in many other global contexts, most queer communities suffer from invisibility in the news media as news outlets largely avoid coverage of gay issues and/or act as if the groups do not exist as threats of criminalization and social stigmatization loom large. When news narratives do emerge, they further marginalize and criminalize gay and lesbian communities. For example, Goh’s (2008) analysis of the now-visible gay community in Singapore showed how national newspaper coverage served as a governmental ‘weapon,’ constructing gays as deviant, promiscuous, threatening the social order and in need of intervention (Goh, 2008: 394). Like Goh’s (2008) work, this project hopes to fill a void by studying news discourses surrounding homosexuality in non-western contexts. Given India’s history, our work offers a unique opportunity to examine postcolonial influences by focusing on English-language newspaper coverage of gay communities in indigenous cultures.

Research approach

Drawing from a critical paradigm influenced by hegemonic and political economic approaches, this project views the process of framing as ‘the outcome of newsgathering routines by which journalists convey information about issues and events from the perspective of values held by political and economic elites’ (D’Angelo, 1992: 876; see also Goffman, 1974; Tuchman, 1978). Mainstream news media thus become central sites where various actors struggle to promote their preferred meanings, definitions, and images. What becomes ‘news’ out of this ‘struggle’ depends on an ideological – and therefore necessarily powerful – ‘selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters’ (Gitlin, 1980: 6). These definitions come to dominate not only what makes ‘the news’ but also how audiences interpret those events.

Newspapers remain a primary and popular source of information for people in India with the industry expecting continued increases in readership (Vaidyanathan, 2011). While Hindi is the most commonly spoken language in India, English is considered the lingua franca (Masani, 2012) and ‘the most important for national, political, and commercial communication’ (Central Intelligence Agency, 2012). Therefore, this study relied on English-language newspapers and used qualitative textual analysis to determine the narrative framing devices journalists relied upon in reporting on this controversial case.

Our sample of news stories was derived using the Lexis Nexis database with the keyword ‘Siras AND Aligarh.’ This initial search returned 281 news articles from which we removed stories from non-Indian publications, smaller regional and non-broadsheet Indian publications. We also excluded articles that only briefly mentioned Siras’s case as part of a larger story, letters to the editor, film reviews, editorials, and duplicate articles. The final sample contained 83 articles from national English-language Indian publications including DNA, The New Indian Express, The Economic Times, The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Pioneer, The Telegraph, and The Times of India and covered the period from 15 February 2010 to 12 September 2016. Stories were analyzed qualitatively using two-cycle coding by both researchers of this study. First, we read each article and assigned codes to chunks of the text as they emerged (Miles et al., 2014). We then re-read the articles and grouped the previously coded text segments ‘into a smaller number of categories, themes or constructs’ (Miles et al., 2014: 86). This allowed us to determine the frames that emerged consistently across the sample, which we discuss in our findings later in this article. Throughout this process, we conversed with each other about the dominant frames we saw emerging and the range of possible meanings that could be attributed to our findings. We employed our diverse backgrounds – a doctoral student originally from India and a Caucasian associate professor from the USA – to strengthen the validity of our analysis (Intemann, 2012; Lindlof and Taylor, 2011; Tracy, 2013).

Narrative frames used to report the Siras case

While reporting of the initial Siras ‘gay sex tape’ began as an isolated local episode, it was ultimately catapulted to the center of a national debate. Siras died three months after the first article was published, yet his story persisted for over six years. Our textual analysis revealed several predominant framing devices journalists relied upon to unpack the ways in which the case essentialized gay identity, signified civil rights and citizenship, complicated sexuality and consent, problematized the public/private boundaries of sexuality, and negotiated competing claims of morality.

Essentializing gay identity

From the beginning of the sample, the label of ‘gay’ or of Siras belonging to the LGBTQ community is applied in coverage of the case. This is significant because ‘gay’ and ‘LGBTQ’ are not terms of Indian origin yet were used to frame the story throughout the sample. Siras is often referred to in headlines as the ‘gay professor’ or the ‘gay teacher,’ starting from the first article in our sample, ‘AMU suspends “gay” teacher’ (The Indian Express, 2010a). In that article, the label ‘gay’ is confined to quotation marks, yet the case is assigned to the larger universe of LGBTQ issues by mentioning that AMU had received complaints against Siras because he was a ‘homosexual’ and had ‘homosexual relations’ with a rickshaw-puller. In the next several articles, journalists connect the case to LGBTQ communities by mentioning that AMU was concerned about gay rights on campus and including as sources members of the LGBTQ community and activist organizations.

Siras, however, does not refer to himself as gay or as a member of the LGBTQ community until a few days into the story. By then, the story had firmly been framed as a gay rights story with Siras, now a self-identified gay man, the central protagonist. The first article to represent him as a self-described gay man doesn’t occur until nine days into the sample: ‘Prof never hid he was gay’ (The Indian Express, 2010c). Siras is directly quoted in that article as saying, ‘I never hid the fact that I was gay, but was never overt about it either’ (The Indian Express, 2010c). In the next article, he is further associated with the LGBTQ label when he says he is considering offers of support from gay rights groups that have reached out to him. From here on, Siras is uniquely identified as gay to fit what appears to be a pre-established narrative that he was ‘set up’ by university officials because of his sexuality. This charge is implied in headlines such as ‘Aligarh Muslim University professor suspended for being gay’ and ‘AMU action against prof homophobia.’ Siras is later cited as saying he wanted to serve the gay community for the rest of his life.

News reports place Siras’s experience of being gay as the ‘loneliness of a man looking at the full moon, yearning for his lover … the full moon represents a gay lover: all poems are about the love of one man for another’ (Edmond, 2010d). These words appear under the headline, ‘Homosexuality is an uncontrollable feeling, like poetry.’ The actor who later plays Siras in the 2016 film Aligarh that was based on this case is also praised for being ‘brave and fearless’ (Jha, 2015) because of his decision to take on the role of a gay man.

Ascribing the modifier ‘gay’ to Siras as a fixed identity category defines sexuality along very narrow essentialized, biological ways that deviate from the presumed ‘norm’ of heterosexuality. Homosexuality is described in news reports as a ‘normal variant of human sexuality’ (Mascarenhas, 2010), a significant declaration considering the widely perceived nature of homosexuality in India as aberrant (Sheikh, 2014). In news stories, some of Siras’s friends and relatives refuse to know him; one of his neighbors described him as unusual and effeminate.

Defining civil rights and citizenship in India

News reports also constructed the narrative of the Siras case in relation to the democratic ideals of citizenship in India. Sexuality was equated with other individual rights guaranteed by the Indian constitution. While expanding civil rights to gays is critical, it is important to note that these legal and news discourses ‘inevitably end up creating a category of the “homosexual” as a special group in need of recognition as a universal citizen-subject (and also perhaps in need of surveillance)’ (Bakshi and Sen, 2012: 175).

This legal framing was apparent from the beginning of the sample in which Section 377, which had been struck down the previous year by the Delhi High Court, was described as a ‘violation of fundamental rights of life and liberty and the right to equality as guaranteed in the Constitution’ (The Indian Express, 2010a). Mehta, who directed the film Aligarh, raised concerns about ‘getting into an environment where such freedoms are being endangered’ (Ohri, 2016). ‘This is our country,’ he said, ‘this is tolerant India’ (Jha, 2016). He considered his film a means of advancing equal rights in India, thereby transforming the film from a creative and professional product to a patriotic one. The actor who played Siras in the film went so far as to suggest that censor boards are antithetical to the idea of a democracy.

News reports in our sample also mentioned other civil rights such as the right to privacy, and in the case of the film Aligarh, the freedom of expression, the freedom of choice, and the right to dissent. The violation of these rights was seen as resulting in legal repercussions – ‘wrongful confinement, assault and use of criminal force, trespass, criminal intimidation’ (Sahu, 2010) – equivalent to the charges that were brought against the individuals who had stormed Siras in his home.

References to the fundamental rights in the Indian constitution were not limited to the narrative text of the sample; several sources were quoted expressing this sentiment both directly and indirectly. This indicated an awareness of one’s rights as an Indian citizen at the level of the average person, even if their words were not expressed in technical legal language. For example, one source, a transgender person referred to as Prince, was quoted as saying that ‘it seems that no one in the university has a right to live his or her own life the way they want’ (The Times of India, 2010). Another source, a professor from Delhi University, said ‘Nobody has a right to force their way into anybody’s bedroom. University officials should have penalised the intruders. Society should respect individual’s right to privacy and not dictate how they should live’ (Kumar, 2010). Expert sources cited in news reports were often in agreement. Aditya Bondopadhyay, for instance, offered his professional opinion as a lawyer and gay rights activist when he said, ‘From invasion of privacy to defamation of sort, the professor can surely fight back’ (The Times of India, 2010).

Complicating sexuality and consent

Another dominant frame was that of consent with respect to the sexual encounter between Siras and his partner. This pattern was also established in the first article with mention of the 2009 Delhi High Court decision that decriminalized consensual sex acts. This frame drew attention to the fact that Siras and his partner had been engaged in consensual sex and should not be considered punishable by AMU. ‘Consensual sex,’ said Mishra in The Economic Times (2010), ‘isn’t a crime in itself.’

It is not surprising that journalists would raise and repeat the issues involving consent in same-sex encounters; it had been the central argument of the case that had led up to the Delhi High Court’s decision, and Siras’s case had followed soon after. The narrative of consent may have been readily available to Indian newsmakers and was easily transferable to the reporting of the Siras case. The journalistic repetition of the sexual acts as consensual served not only as a way to emphasize the decision of the Delhi High Court but also to differentiate the Siras case from non-consensual acts, a technique that bifurcated the otherwise ‘perverse’ notion of homosexuality (Sheikh, 2014) into one version that is consensual and acceptable and another that is perverse and non-consensual. In this way, the story transformed from one that could have simply been about homosexual behavior to one that ultimately emerged about the understanding between two individuals about their sexual relationship regardless of their sexual identities. Those who intervened in the relationship and exacted punishment were cast as the villainous party.

This frame was also significant because homosexual acts, regardless of consent, were recriminalized in 2013, a few years after the Aligarh case. The consent frame, however, persisted in the Siras case, indicating that legal erasure of the barrier between consensual and non-consensual sex was irrelevant to the overarching media narrative. In fact, two years after the reinstatement of Section 377, Siras’s partner was cited in news reports calling for its repeal as were political figures from the otherwise oppositional Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress Party. As the case for the decriminalization of consensual homosexual acts continues to play out in both politics and the culture, the reliance on the consent frame by news outlets will be instrumental to these understandings.

Demarcating sexual spaces

News coverage frequently positioned the legality and acceptability of sexuality as a function of location, distinguishing between sex acts performed in ‘public’ or ‘private’ spaces. In this way, marginal sexualities were framed as acceptable or otherwise based on where they occurred. The debate over whether Siras was permitted to ‘behave’ as a gay man ‘in public’ on the AMU campus, for instance, was dependent on cultural distinctions of public and private spaces (Al Baset, 2012; Mandal, 2009; Singh, 2015). Journalistic discourses were complicated by Siras being forcibly outed in his home, normally a ‘private’ space that was located on the public space of the university campus. This was reflected in the inconsistent way that journalists reported what would be considered a simple journalistic ‘fact’ – the ‘where’ of the story. Sometimes journalists would place the events in Siras’s private space, and sometimes they would place it in the public space. It was not unusual for that one location to be referred to in both ways at different points in one article or by the use of hybrid phrases such as ‘official residence’ (The Indian Express, 2010b), ‘campus quarters’ (Edmond, 2010c), and ‘house inside the campus’ (Rahman, 2010). Many articles used language that implied Siras’s home to be a private space, such as ‘his bedroom’ (Edmond, 2010a) and ‘his house’ (Sahu, 2010). AMU, however, felt differently. The Vice Chancellor PK Abdul Aziz bifurcated the public/private, deviant/acceptable binary in his statement that the ‘university would have no objection in such acts outside the campus at his private space, but certainly won’t tolerate it in university property’ (The Indian Express, 2010b). According to him, Siras’s home ‘is inside the campus, which is a public place’ (Edmond, 2010c). ‘Do it outside,’ Aziz said. ‘Nobody is bothered’ (Edmond, 2012).

Beyond private/public, location was also conceived based on differences in attitudes toward the LGBTQ community in urban/rural areas in India. In some cases, urban India was presented as LGBTQ-friendly through the use of supportive sources from big cities like Delhi and Mumbai. By contrast, Mehta, the director of the film Aligarh, was portrayed in our sample as describing smaller cities as more accepting. Some news reports extended discussions of space beyond India, referencing the success of the film Aligarh in international film festivals in South Korea and the UK. In this way, foreign attitudes were deemed to be the standard of progressiveness that Indians were held to.

Neoliberal logic cast the USA in a particularly privileged position. Even though it was only mentioned a handful of times in the sample, the USA was always represented as a sort of LGBTQ ‘Mecca.’ For example, the Indian arm of the US-based organization Lamda Legal was described as a ‘U.S. based organization that gives legal aid to gay people in distress’ (Edmond, 2010b). After being labeled as gay by the media, Siras was directly quoted as wanting to go to the USA because it was the only place where he was ‘free to be gay’ (Edmond, 2010a). His partner was cited as confirming this fact, adding, ‘I think he would have taken me with him’ (Agha, 2010). In this way, the USA emerged as the epicenter of a global LGBTQ community and a refuge for persecuted non-heterosexuals across the world.

Competing claims of morality

News reports also framed the Siras case through the lens of popular morality. One of the articles simply stated that Siras had been suspended from AMU for ‘immoral activities’ (The Pioneer, 2010). According to Siras’s partner, one of the people who broke into the home had asked Siras if he was ashamed of being caught with another man. The morality issue, however, took many forms as seen from the conflicting language throughout the sample, like ‘moral police’ (The Telegraph, 2010), ‘disgrace’ (Gill, 2010), ‘wonderful human being’ (Ganjapure, 2010), and ‘reputable family’ (Ganjapure and John, 2010).

At times, the lens of morality stemmed from religious values as in the case of extremist Hindutva and Islamist groups who opposed the film Aligarh because of its portrayal of homosexuality. AMU was described by its vice chancellor as based on ‘well-guarded’ (Edmond, 2012) Muslim values. A professor at AMU, however, countered this by calling it a distraction from standing corruption charges against the vice chancellor.

The vice chancellor also associated homosexuality with ‘free sex,’ a term that may refer to having sex outside of marriage, being promiscuous, or both. Regardless, Aziz makes it clear that AMU could not ‘digest homosexuality and free sex’ (The Indian Express, 2010b) and ‘cannot be seen as lenient; we cannot tolerate free sex’ (Edmond, 2010c). Rhetorically positioning ‘free sex’ as the opposing binary of reputable and acceptable behavior, Aziz said, ‘AMU is an institution of international repute and its students go out with character. Homosexuality is not good for them and so such acts could not be allowed on campus’ (The Indian Express, 2010b).

The morality frame was also used to question traditional heteronormativity in Indian society. Hypothetical situations were raised in which sources such as a gay rights activist Shruti claimed, ‘I am sure if he was sleeping with a woman they would not raise an eyebrow’ (Edmond, 2010b). A similar sentiment was expressed by activist Anjali Gopalan: ‘Will they catch a man who is having sex with a woman who is not his wife?’ (The Times of India, 2010). Similar heteronormative hypocrisy was highlighted in the restrictions that Indian censorship authorities placed on the film Aligarh. An LGBTQ rights activist felt that it was ‘unfortunate that the CBFC did not see wrong in nudity and objectification of women, but thought of homosexuality as an impurity’ (Sukanya, 2016). As the film’s director Mehta put it, ‘if the viewer is denied a clean, dignified and thought provoking true-life story like ours, but forced to watch bouncing breasts and penile jokes on day time TV, there is something seriously wrong with the people we elected to power’ (Sukanya, 2016).

Discussion: Considering sexual citizenship in India

The story of Ramchandra Siras occupies a unique position in Indian journalism and for us as queer media studies scholars. As this study has shown, news coverage was initially confined to a local incident in a small town in northern India but ultimately outlived the man at the center of the story. The story of his final days endured in the mainstream media, not just in the news but in the form of a Hindi film that earned worldwide acclaim. Our study thus examined how English-language Indian newspapers attempted to frame this continuing story; even though journalists appeared to be aware of Section 377, they often strayed from a unidimensional legal interpretation of the ruling into other more complex meanings and understandings of sexuality and citizenship. This was evident by the frames they deployed to make sense of what happened in Aligarh in 2010.

Central to this story is how sexual citizenship is defined, demarcated and negotiated in contemporary globalized India. Sexual citizenship, initially conceptualized in the 1990s, was understood as ‘the intertwining of market and state’ institutions that permit sexual minorities ‘only a partial and privatized citizenship in the realms of leisure and lifestyle’ (Volpp, 2017; see also Bell and Binnie, 2000; Evans, 2013; Weeks, 1998). Contemporary understandings of ‘sexual citizenship’ vary, and some scholars have used the term to characterize ‘non-normative’ sexual subjects who define themselves as a minority group, one that seeks inclusion to civil, political and social rights and institutions historically bound by heterosexuality as a ‘thick border of citizenship’ (Cossman, 2007: 7). Some scholars argue that in particular sites, gay and lesbian subjects represent ideal neoliberal consumer citizens – ‘privatized, self-governing, and sexually free’ (Volpp, 2017). Queering the boundaries of citizenship challenges and threatens how citizenship has been defined, as it has by its very nature included some at the expense of excluding others (Volpp, 2017). Queering citizenship, then, would mean redefining and reconsidering normality and deviance, membership and exclusion, insider and outsider status.

These tensions were at play in reporting on the Siras case. For example, journalists themselves appeared to vacillate on the acceptability of alternative sexualities. While they labeled Siras a ‘gay man’ before Siras even did, they struggled to define his sexuality within the realm of Indian culture. This tension was evident in frames that made legal allowances for same-sex relations while still debating its social acceptability. The multiple contradictory frames in Siras’s story suggest an ideological shift occurring amongst the elite of India and, by extension, in Indian culture (Carragee and Roefs 2004; D’Angelo and Kuypers, 2010; Gitlin, 1980; Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen, 2011). In other words, attitudes towards the Western label of LGBTQ are in flux with some members of elite India pushing for the country to enter the ‘era of the visible’ (Walters, 2001: 338) with LGBTQ identity equal to representations in the western world.

This visibility, however, appeared to be applied inconsistently. While Siras was labeled gay immediately, that label evaded his partner, Irfan, the rickshaw-puller who was filmed with Siras. At no point in our sample was Irfan described as gay. Moreover, he was quoted saying that he wasn’t gay, that he was just Siras’s companion, and that he may have been enticed into having sex with Siras for money. In addition, Siras was portrayed as an intellectual, and the story from the very first article centers on him. Irfan is simply portrayed as an anonymous ‘rickshaw-puller’ who doesn’t garner news coverage independently. He is identified by name only a couple of times, and the articles never explore his relationship with Siras or how the controversy impacted him. Only after Siras’s death is Irfan the subject of a handful of articles before the sample turns to the film Aligarh, which too is focused on Siras. Further, the sample regularly emphasized Siras’s right to privacy but dismissed Irfan’s via a quotation from the writer of the film Aligarh who blamed Irfan for revealing his identity in press interviews.

This double standard seems to emerge from the difference in perceived social status between Siras, an upper-caste Hindu professor, and Irfan, a poor Muslim laborer. Not only did this lead to differential treatment of their privacy but also contributed to their unequal access to the elite gay label (Jawale, 2016; Kole, 2007). Sexuality was also defined solely in terms of the imported LGBTQ category from the West and not according to any of the extant ‘multiplicities of queer sexualities’ (Kole, 2007: 13) in India. News reports perpetuated narrow, hegemonically prescribed western notions of sexuality to Indian culture at the expense of its historic social and political structures. As a result, the LGBTQ label is available only to the elite, a form of policing of sexual citizenship. Given its colonial past, these ideological constructs of sexuality may be influenced by the West, which, despite its own struggles for sexual equality, is constructed by Indian newsmakers as the Promised Land for LGBTQ communities. This may occur in part from international human rights organizations that advocate for the recognition of dominant western notions of sexuality as a condition for funding treatments and managing diseases like HIV/AIDS (Kole, 2007). This construction of sexuality may signal more progressive and inclusive sexual citizenship (Becker, 2006; Gross, 2001; Moscowitz, 2013; Sender, 2005; Walters, 2001) but in reality serves as a false substitute composed of a postcolonial rendering of sexuality in India, that of the superior western sexuality overshadowing inferior indigenous sexualities (Kole, 2007). These narratives are part of an overall discursive neoliberal project that inevitably privileges globalization and appropriates traditional westernized notions of ‘gay’ at the expense of a more expansive range of indigenous alternative sexualities. This is especially evident in how sources from AMU, the Indian government, and Indian activist organizations all use language that reflects dominant notions of western sexuality regardless of their stance on Siras.

As the legal and cultural discourses surrounding sexuality in India fail to reach a consensus, the media appear ‘to absorb what can be absorbed into the dominant structure of definitions and images and to push the rest to the margins of social life’ (Gitlin, 1980: 5). In this case, the media separates alternative sexualities into ‘legitimate main acts and illegitimate sideshows’ (Gitlin, 1980: 6), a privileged western sexuality that fits neatly into a defined and fixed ‘gay’ identity category, and other diverse sexualities that are deemed too illegitimate to be seen or even named in Indian terms in their own indigenous nation. In this way, while media outlets and the sources they rely upon appear to advocate for Siras’s ‘gay’ sexuality or at least consider it a legitimate identity category in India’s cultural landscape, they inadvertently only create space for dominant, fixed, and essentialized western notions of sexuality.

As cultural scholars, our attention also focuses on the absence of particular groups and narratives in LGBTQ representations. The absence of religious framing is noteworthy – especially considering the historic religious roots of AMU and previously reported opposition to decriminalization from religious groups in India (Kole, 2007; Misra, 2009; Sheikh, 2014). No religious authority figures such as priests or clerics were used as sources, and religious opposition only appeared to stem from institutions such as AMU or from extremist groups. No specific religious group was shown as unilaterally opposing the LGBTQ community. Newspapers largely treated the Siras case and the acceptability of homosexuality as a secular issue.

Also conspicuous in its absence are voices from the broader queer community, as the story was only centered on very narrow intersections of gender and sexuality. The face of the queer community in India, as symbolized in the sample, was of only gay men with high cultural capital.

The story of Siras lives on through sustained media coverage, most notably with the recent decriminalization of gay sex in 2018. Edmond (2018) echoes the cautious approach to decriminalization (Al Baset, 2012; Mandal, 2009; Maureemootoo, 2014; Singh, 2015) when he says, ‘gay sex is not criminal once again, but we still do not have a law to prevent discrimination against sexual minorities’ (Edmond, 2018). While this project only focused on a single case and was limited to English-language national publications, our study nevertheless provides a lens into the dominant journalistic discourses surrounding sexual identities in this particular defining moment for India. Future research should consider how these narratives are constructed and produced in newsrooms, including in-depth interviews to explore how journalists covered the story and how editors influence the process. Future work should also consider other forms of Indian media including non-English-language news – print and broadcast – as Aligarh is a mid-sized city, both television news and print/online sources play an important role. While English remains the lingua franca, the rise of the regional press in India indicates that it’s not necessarily the language in which most media is consumed. A comparative analysis of non-English news titles could yield divergent patterns and framing devices that would further advance our understandings. In addition, contextualizing these news stories within the larger mediascape of entertainment media and advertising messages, especially considering the widespread impact of the film Aligarh, is an important area of inquiry to explore. Future research should also interrogate the structural factors and institutional norms that influenced how newsmakers framed this case as well as coverage of the recent High Court’s decision to decriminalize sexuality, taking into account the varied ways in which Indian and global audiences make sense of these messages. We hope this study will thus lead to a sustained program of research into how intersectional identities of gender, sexuality and class play out in mediated discourses of sexual citizenship in India, as these constructions inevitably influence audiences, voters, activists, policymakers, and legislators (Azad and Nayak, 2016; Chakrapani et al., 2007; Jawale, 2016; Misra, 2009).

Footnotes

Khadija Ejaz is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Barry University, Florida, in the USA. She recently earned her doctorate in mass communications at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. She has been published in the Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Journalism Practice. Her research interests include critical theory, science communication, and religion.

Leigh Moscowitz is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of The Battle over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism through the Media, Snatched: News Coverage of Child Abductions, and Media and the Coming Out of Gay Male Athletes in American Team Sports. Her work has appeared in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

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