Everyone knows that MSMs (men who have sex with men) face extreme harassment from cops. In a bid to understand why, DNA got a Mumbai police constable to speak freely about his attitude to MSMs. What we heard shocked some of us. But it made one thing clear — nothing will change unless the average cop is sensitised to the issue of gay rights. Here is what the cop told Yogesh Pawar:

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I am from the Bhandari community. I lost my father when I was in class V. My mother, who worked as an ayah in the municipal hospital, brought up my two elder sisters and me. Though I now live in Dahisar, I grew up in the BDD chawls at Worli, where my family lived.

During my class X summer vacation, my aunt and her children came visiting from our village, Kharepatan, in the Konkan. Since ours was a one-room home, the guests slept inside, and I went to the terrace to sleep.

Many boys and men from the chawls slept there in the summer months. I set my mattress down at the end of a row, since the others knew each other and wanted to chat. I lay down to watch the stars, and didn’t know when I fell asleep.

Well past midnight, I felt like I heard something strange, and woke up. I went to pee in the far corner of the terrace, where everybody relieved themselves, and stopped when I saw a boy performing oral sex on another. The other boy was a neighbour from the floor below and was in my vyayamshaala. He saw me and winked.

“Don’t be shy… come, it feels good,” he said. I don’t know if it was the weirdness of it, or the attraction of something new, but I went ahead and replaced him. After it was over, I felt guilty, and sickened by what had happened. The next day onward, I refused to go up to the terrace to sleep, and slept instead in the corridor just outside our door even if we had guests.

I think men who have sex with men are sick. If you want to have fun, have it with women, but what is this perversion? When I was training to be a constable, a batchmate had once touched me funnily. I socked him in the face really hard and kicked him around till he was on the floor. He never resisted. Others who came to intervene kept asking me what had happened. I just spat in his direction and said, “Ask this g#ndu. He’ll tell you what happened!”

Nobody likes to raise their hand but you have to stop what is wrong when you see it. I have never tolerated homogiri of any kind. If they want to indulge in things like this, then they should wear a sari and go around clapping.

I think this is something that has come to us from the upper classes, which got it from foreign countries like America. Our country has such a nice culture, but nowadays, in the name of modernity, people are going into these perversions.

When I first got posted in Dadar station in 1998, I began going along on ‘shikar’, as it was jokingly called. It would mean going to the dark loo at the far end where the homos would converge in the evening. The darkness and civil clothes would mask our entry, and we would grab them and bring them to the chowky.  I would rough them up and threaten to register a case against them under Section 377. The other cops would talk to them sweetly and say they should just pay and leave. Almost all the guys preferred to do the latter. We would let off the others, they were kadka (broke) anyway. Some stations are notorious for this. Being posted there always ensures a special bonus from these guys.  Some of the English-speaking types think that they know the law and try to talk smart. Our courts should also think about what they doing. How can they allow this perversion to become legal? What will happen to our future and culture and tradition? You tell me, am I right or not? Which right-minded individual will not support us?

A few months ago, at Matunga station, I caught this 40-year-old. When I dragged him out, he started saying he is not doing anything illegal and began talking about Supreme Court and this and that. Two slaps and he was weeping. (Laughs) He was loaded. Cash. Two mobiles. Rings. Chain. He had no card, otherwise it would have been a lottery. But we don’t get bakras like that always. Legal or illegal, once we threaten to send a constable to take them home to their family, most of them are willing to do anything. With ATMs near the station, it has all become too easy.

I don’t feel guilty about anything that I do. If the homos feel so bad about what is happening, then they should stop this kind of behaviour. It is not like we are going to their houses and picking them up. They come here and start their nonsense and then they blame us. And now they are also talking about rights and starting organisations.

Do you think we don’t know what these pansy-looking men with bags distributing AIDS pamphlets and condoms are up to? But our sarkar is such a donkey. It is encouraging these people unnecessarily. If you start doing this, then in a few years these homos will start doing it on the roads in the open.

We all have families and children. We have to wipe out this menace in one way or the other.