BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav has said that the best way to address the challenges facing the society, including the question of alternate sexual minorities, was to strengthen the conservative ideal of the family.
While speaking at Manorama Hortus on Friday, Madhav suggested that wokeism, which he termed "extreme liberalism", was a movement away from family values. "But conservatives always wanted to uphold the family system," Madhav said.
Liberalism is being taken to such an extreme that Madhav said "very unique questions" were coming up in countries like the USA and the UK. For instance, he said that many schools in the USA had an admission proforma that allowed the child to identify his or her sex. "Parents cannot do that. They cannot say that my child is a boy or a girl. It has to be decided by that boy or girl," Madhav said.
Madhav, who is also an executive council member of the RSS, found this to be unsettling. "The child can go to the school and declare that I'm a cat," he said. "The school will write that a particular child is a cat, and for the cat there has to a separate pooing place. This is the extent to which they are going in the name of individual identity," he said, and added: "This kind of wokeism is actually madness."
It seems that Madhav had taken information from a documentary by right-wing commentator Matt Walsh, 'What is a Woman?' In the interview, a woman tells the interviewer that schoolchildren in New York are self-identifying as animals and disrupting classrooms.
In the same interview, a trans woman tells Walsh that she is both a "furry" and a "therian". And both these quotes were clubbed to give the impression that children were acting like animals in schools.
(Furries are people interested in anthropomorphism, which is attributing human characteristics to animals and objects. On the other hand, therians believe they are some other species, say dog or cat or owl, trapped in a human body.)
Reuters has fact-checked claims about "furries" in US schools in the past and found no evidence of them disrupting classrooms or schools developing a policy of including them as a formal identity.
The fact is, the US Department of Education has adopted policies that respect the gender identities of all students, such as the use of the name a student goes by, which may be different from their legal name, and pronouns that reflect a student’s gender identity.
The Department also implements policies to safeguard students' privacy, such as maintaining the confidentiality of a student’s birth name or sex assigned at birth if the student wishes to keep this information private.
Ram Madhav said that there indeed was an issue with LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual) persons in India. "People with certain sexual orientations have always existed in our society," he said. He cited the examples of Brihannala (Arjun's eunuch disguise) and Shikhandi (King Drupada's daughter who transforms into a male and becomes a trans man) to show that alternative sexual identities have existed in Indian mythology.
He called them "exceptions". "Some people have certain proclivities, some orientations," Madhav said. "How to deal with them," he asked, but his answer was not specific. "They themselves will decide or society will decide or parents will decide," he said.
He said the RSS ideology was against criminalising them. "We never considered them as outcasts or have made a call to throw them out", he said. Yet, there was a hint of condescension. "We gave them whatever space is legitimately allowed for alternative sexual identities," he said, suggesting a lower status for those from sexual minorities.
Madhav said it was the RSS leadership that had first insisted that it was wrong to penalise people indulging in same-sex relationships. But he also hinted that alternate sexual behaviour could be customised. "It is an activity that needs to be counselled, addressed by society, by family, and by religious institutions," Madhav said, and added: "The best way is to strengthen the family institution."
He said the RSS had already embarked on a project called Kudumba Prabodhan to strengthen the family. It was started with the realisation that strengthening the family institution would address all challenges.