Most startlingly, at least one of the Shiv Sena in Uttar Pradesh seems to know his Sappho. Mr Vijay Kumar of Meerut is a Shiv Sainik, and he doesn?t want his India to turn ?into Lesbos?. His public outrage was provoked by Seeta and Vandana ? colleagues in a Meerut hosiery factory, in their late teens ? falling in love with each other and deciding to ?get married? in a temple last Sunday. The course of this love did not run quite smooth. After Seeta?s family came to know of their union, she suffered abuse in her home which then spread to the entire neighbourhood and was taken up by the local Shiv Sena. She tried to kill herself, was taken to hospital, and the outraged public continued protesting outside her ward against her ?perverted? and ?anti-social? behaviour. Vandana?s family decided to treat their relationship as a joke and lock her up. The district law-keepers ? who had recently beaten up heterosexual couples for allegedly being amorous in public ? have launched a probe into same-sex marriages in the area.

There are two sets of attitudes at work here. First, oppressive and violent discrimination against lesbians in the family and by the state. Second, resistance to the idea of solemnized same-sex unions. Lesbian pornography is standard heterosexual fare; but lesbian marriages bring down, most often, the iron hand of society and state. The UP Shiv Sena?s virulent revulsion is representative here of more or less the entire country. In only one rather exceptional case, the police had refused to register a case against two women in Amritsar who had eloped and got ?married? because there is no Indian law against same-sex marriage. The law lies in the lack of it. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code forbids intercourse against ?the order of nature?. And since this is usually interpreted as sodomy, this law is used by the police against homosexual men. The colonial lawmakers and their postcolonial implementers could not imagine lesbianism ? which might be a bizarrely mixed blessing for women.

The invisibility of lesbians is a result of the twofold injustice of homophobia and gender inequality. However, more women than men seem to attempt same-sex marriages through some sort of public or private ritual. Yet the consequences of public disclosure are, most often, irredeemably tragic, involving suicide or ostracization by family and community. The global campaign against HIV/AIDS has brought homosexuality into the arena of public debate, although the government has become adept at chickening out of taking a clear line on it. Lesbians are still in the margins of this activism. Yet their plight, together with the issue of same-sex marriage, shows how sexual justice ought to be a human rights issue, rather than a public health one. Two women or two men ought to be able to marry each other, not because that would mean safer sex, but because equality, dignity and liberty are sacred words in the Indian Constitution.