What's porn got to do with it?

It’s an encounter I’ll never forget. I was going around Khajuraho a few years ago and there, among the teeming French tourists and the tour guides who keep trying to push you towards the `sex’ temples, were these two middle-class, middle-India couples. Unlike us, who’d made our way all the way from Delhi, these two couples looked like they weren’t from very far. The reason I say that, is because as soon as we entered the temple complex, the two men instantly sat down on the lawns as if the famed sculptures were like a boring history lecture and they’d much rather soak in the sun.But it’s not them, but the reactions of the women accompanying them, that became an eye-opener for me. While the depictions at the temple made our jaws drop, made us giggle at times like school girls and sometimes even embarrassed to look, these two women went about their exploration in a calm, inquisitive way. I remember overhearing their conversation where they were deconstructing a particularly intimate embrace and that’s when it hit m — all this erotica in various forms from homosexuality to bestiality, it’s as much a part of us as is the image of a woman being a Sati Savitri. And perhaps it’s because most of us have lived in cities all our lives, in secluded, sanitised environments, we forget all this, and become such prudes.I thought about all this as I read with interest the public interest litigation filed in the Supreme Court of India by a petitioner named Kamlesh Vaswani. In his PIL, Vaswani argues that sex crimes against women and children, and here he specifically cites the instance of the brutal gangrape in Delhi, are fuelled by pornography. He bolsters his argument by referring to some mind-boggling statistics for instance how 20 crore pornographic video clips are available to the Indian consumer through various media and how the IT ministry is helpless in curbing this menace he calls ``worse than Hitler, worse than AIDS, cancer or any other epidemic. It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped.’’Indeed — how could anyone take this seriously, you ask, but the Supreme Court has. And the bad news is that now babus of the Ministry of Telecom, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the Ministry of Home Affairs are generating files upon files, memos after memos with scrawled notes saying ``For your perusal’’ to determine a national policy on pornography when they really should be spending their time doing other useful things. And while I’m no advocate of pornography and neither am I an expert on the impact it has on potential sex offenders, but I do have a problem with the lack of substantive evidence behind various linkages, and then a series of crackdowns. For example, the I and B ministry now has a separate body that is going through TV and other content with a fine tooth comb to see whether it’s gender sensitive. They now feel further vindicated to come down hard on channels like Fashion TV because of the outrage caused by the December 16 gang rape. In fact, I heard that the I & B minister Manish Tewari was recently reluctant to act upon another one of hundred complaints of indecency against the channel. ``It is the nature of their existence, they deal with fashion and if someone finds it offensive, they should just flip the channel,’’ he’s reported to have said. But the inter-ministerial group comprising joint secretaries would have none of it, and so an advisory was issued. It has faced temporary bans several times in the past.I am sure it is this overseeing which prompts channels to even bleep out the words `breast’ or `ass’ from English sitcoms and while it is irritating, what bothers me more is the effort that goes into such monitoring. I know that after December 16 last year, many of us are still haunted in our minds by the image of some animals brutalising the 23-year-old woman.I know that there’s been so much discussion but we’re still a bit lost about how to fix things, especially since instances of other women getting gangraped, assaulted, molested, harassed haven’t paused, not even for a single cycle of news headlines. In fact, we now see copycat stories, the most recent of a little girl being held in captivity and brutalised in the Capital. But, seriously, were the accused watching FTV or pornography before committing such crimes? I doubt it, don’t you?Sunetra  Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News.