Ghulam Nabi Azad says gay sex is a ‘disease’ India’s health minister has said homosexuality is a “disease” which is “spreading fast” in the country.
Ghulam Nabi Azad also told a meeting that gay sex was “unnatural”. Activists said his comments were “unfortunate”.
India’s Supreme Court decriminalised gay sex in the country in a landmark judgement in 2009.
The ruling was widely welcomed by India’s gay community, which said the order would help protect them from harassment and persecution.
Mr Azad told a meeting on HIV/Aids in Delhi on Monday that gay sex “which was found more in the developed world, has now unfortunately come to our country and there is a substantial number of such people in India”.
“Even through it [homosexuality] is unnatural, it exists in our country and is now fast spreading, making it tough to detect it,” he said.
“With relationships changing, men are having sex with men now. Though it is easy to find women sex workers and educate them on sex, it is a challenge to identify men having sex with men.”
Gay rights activists have criticised Mr Azad’s comments.
“It’s unfortunate, regrettable and totally unacceptable that a minister of his stature… is still insensitive to a vulnerable groups such as MSM [men who have sex with men],” Hindustan Times newspaper quoted Anand Grover, United Nation’s special rapporteur on health, as saying.
According to one estimate, more than 8% of homosexual men in India were infected with HIV, compared to a less than 1% infection rate in the general population.
The 2009 Supreme Court ruling overturned a 148-year-old colonial law which described a same-sex relationship as an “unnatural offence”.
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