Porn Politics

Wasn't it just the other day when a magazine called Debonair sold openly on the stands, with all those curvaceous, home-grown beauties posing for the centrefold? Debonair was a literotica magazine: it not only served you some of the most delectable pair of Indian tits but also some of the finest prose and verse published by any Indian magazine at the time.

I was too young when Debonair was at its peak, edited by some of the finest minds in the country, but I resolutely caught up with the past issues on the pavements of Daryaganj in Delhi and Parade in Kanpur. Of course you looked at the girls first, and once you were done with them, you proceeded to devour the remaining content. Sometime in the early 1990's, when I had just entered journalism, an enterprising young man from Allahabad came out with a similar magazine, Fantasy. It was a bit bolder than Debonair when it came to centrespeads, but it also had a lot of stuff worth reading. The success of Fantasy inspired the publication of about a dozen such magazines, but they were all crudely produced and had crude models striking crude poses.

I doubt if any of them exists today. It doesn't matter, for porn has gone online. But as far as my knowledge goes, Debonair still comes out. But buying it today is a waste of money. I bought one as recently as two years ago from a railway station in Kerala (I can't recall which, perhaps Shoranur), and discovered that Cosmopolitan is bolder.

The point is: these magazines existed till about a decade and a half ago. They did not eat into Indian culture. They did not erode the morals of a traditional Hindu family. Life just went on, just the way it goes on today. In fact, Atal Behari Vajpayee was an avid reader of Debonair, though he kept it under his pillow.

The point is: today, can you walk into a bookshop and find an Indian magazine that features nude Indian women? More importantly, does any publisher have the courage to bring out a magazine that features nude Indian women? The answer is a resounding 'no'. Which publisher would risk his office being stoned or set on fire by the so-called upholders of Indian culture?

The point is: what really went wrong in the past 15 years? As a teenager, I saw Debonair being sold freely on the stands, but as a man who is now almost 40, I would be horrified to find such a magazine being sold over the counter. Horrified, because the publisher would only be courting trouble and inviting violence. So what really went wrong?

It is just that we have gone back in time, thanks to a few hundred thousand men who decided that we have not imbibed enough culture from our mothers' milk and that we need to be fed with the powdered version of Indian culture so that it runs in our veins. It was the rise of the culture vultures that marked the decline of the Indian society. The villain is the BJP, led by L.K. Advani. Had he not set out on the rath yatra way back in 1990 to garner support for the construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya, Debonair might have been carrying Indian nudes even today. But his Hindutva endeavour encouraged every jobless Tom, Dick and Harry to become a custodian of the Hindu culture.

The BJP and the various Hindutva forces should never forget that the BJP came to power at the Centre only because Atal Behari Vajpayee, a much-loved moderate leader and a reader of Debonair, was projected as their prime ministerial candidate. In the 2009 general elections, the public outright rejected the BJP's 'Advani for PM' campaign. Advani, at best, served as a vote-gatherer for Vajpayee. Who should know this better than me -- a silent reporter who covered the BJP from 1996 to 2000, recording its transition from the largest Opposition to being the ruling party.

It was Advani who made the BJP untouchable, and it was Vajpayee who had made the party touchable all over again, with regional parties like the TDP and the DMK supporting his government. But with the exit of Vajpayee, the poet-politician whose appeal cut across party lines but who is now too old and too unwell, the BJP has returned to being an untouchable. And it is likely to remain that way unless it stops talking about the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Really, which Indian or a Hindu today is bothered about the building of a Ram temple in a town as small and as remote as Ayodhya? As it is, the people of Ayodhya are not at all happy with the BJP, which I discovered during a visit to Ayodhya amid the 2004 elections.

The BJP, take it from me, is not going to come to power in the near future, Even the BJP knows that. But what is wrong with the Congress? Why has it lost its balls? Why is India's best known artist, M.F. Hussain, being forced to live in exile and now being granted citizenship by Qatar? Can't Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh stand up and say that Hussain belongs to India and that he should return? But they are scared. We are all scared. Today, we all live in an atmosphere of fear.