Sandip Roy

In short they were wearing the uniform of a young India. A uniform that allowed them access into the sanctum santorum of Indian high society, which they then proceeded to blow up.

The face of that gun-toting faux-VERSACE t-shirt-wearing assailant was haunting in its ordinariness. And its familiarity.

He could be Pakistani.

He could be Indian.

He is almost certainly Muslim.

With newspaper editorials calling for the head of the Indian Home Minister over this colossal failure of intelligence, and demanding a new, zero-tolerance war on terror that many fear could result in more hardship for Muslim Indians, I am curious about the young assailant I saw on television.

 Who was he before he became whatever he is? Three days after the attacks began, we still don’t know what he is. An unknown group called Deccan Mujaheddin took credit, but the New York Times reports that American intelligence officials are beginning to suspect Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Others say they’re from Indian Mujaheddin.

We don’t know whether it was ideology or the promise of cash that sent young men like him into the attackers’ disparate targets: Mumbai’s historic CST train station; the Taj hotel, where Bombay’s elite gather for cocktails and coffee; the trendy Leopold café, where tourists and Bollywood stars relax; the five-star Oberoi, where diamond merchants make deals and starlets wait to be spotted by gossip columnists; a local Chabad House, where an American rabbi and his wife and several others were killed on Friday.

“These men are not poor and illiterate,” Suba Chandra, deputy director at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, told Bloomberg News.  “They are highly motivated youngsters with grievances, real and imagined. There may be more such attacks until we address their grievances and improve intelligence gathering.”

A recent study found that Muslims in India, despite having been President and Bollywood stars, tend to make less money and be less educated. But right now, with the smell of carnage still in the air, with smoke billowing out of beloved landmarks, there is little appetite for understanding grievances.

India’s English-language media wants heads to roll. It’s time for zero tolerance.

“It’s War” headlined the Times of India. “India is Under Attack” said The Hindustan Times. And most ominously, The Telegraph wants no more “crazy initiatives aimed at winning over potential terrorists with love, affirmative action and moral equivalence.”

Who is a “potential” terrorist? What is his profile? The unspoken subtext: Which Muslims in India should we treat with fairness, and which should we write off as “potential terrorists?”

Mira Kamdar, author of Planet India, told a webcast organized by the South Asian Journalists Association,  that she worries that the “blunt instrument” way the Indian police round up young Muslim men will leave them even more alienated. Right now, with some top police officers killed in the line of duty, this is not what India wants to hear, especially from Indians living halfway across the world.

Instead, every newspaper is clamoring for centralized intelligence coordination. The scale and efficiency of the Mumbai attacks made it India’s 9/11. In response, they say, India needs what America got after 9/11: a PATRIOT Act and a Department of Homeland Security. Almost every newspaper has made much of the way Democrats and Republicans “came together” to pass the PATRIOT act with bipartisan support. Look, say the editorial writers, a Department of Homeland Security works. The U.S. has had no attacks since 9/11, they note.

India had its own homegrown version of the PATRIOT Act. The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) was revoked by the current government when it came to office. Human rights groups had long complained about its potential for abuse. Now revoking POTA could lead to the government’s downfall in upcoming elections. Clearly the country’s leaders have been inept in their intelligence gathering. Whether POTA could have plugged the holes that led to the attacks is another question.

The issue, says a friend, is these bombings were not just any bombings. India has had bombings before. But those were bombs laid in trains and garbage cans. This was done by men without masks. These happened in coordinated slow motion as if they were meant to be watched on TV – attacks 15 minutes apart. These attacks literally brought terrorism to the doorstep of the opinion makers. It came to the places where they lunch.

Mumbai’s resilience has become a cliché. It’s survived train bombings, floods, the blasts at the Stock Exchange. But these hotels were the places where the elite feel safe and cocooned. This was Page 3 Bombay, not man-on-the-street Mumbai. “These are the places where what Indians call ‘the creamy layer’ hang out,” says Mira Kamdar. It’s their “islands of security” amidst the chaos of South Bombay. “It’s the elite of Bombay who are really going to be shaken,” says Kamdar.

Shaken, because these young men didn’t want to become the elite. They didn’t want a place at the table. They wanted to upturn the table.

This is what is unfathomable to many Indians.

On my last trip back to India, I met with an Indian who had come back to New Delhi after many years in America. In 1988, he says, out of the 32 graduates of his class at IIT-Delhi, 26 ended up abroad. “In the latest class there are 60 grads and only two have applied for US scholarships,” he told me.

At a time when “new” India is bubbling with optimism, when thousands of Indians are coming back to India, who wouldn’t want to be part of that action?

When journalist Aravind Adiga wrote a novel about a chauffeur who kills his master, he called it “The White Tiger” because he said that was still the anomaly in India. He wondered why more servants didn’t kill their masters. But he worried that “there is a new, very primordial, class divide between people who feel they have and people who feel they have not.”

The story of haves and have-nots in India, in South Asia is part of the larger story of the attack on Mumbai. And I don’t think it’s one that will fall into the purview of any Department of Homeland Security that might get created.

Which brings me to the young men in t-shirts and jeans in plush hotels in South Mumbai.

In a country where every car entering one of the grand new shopping malls has its trunk inspected by uniformed security, how did they know they could walk into the five star hotel with AK-47s and grenades?

In the hushed glamour of the Taj with its 24-hour coffee shops, a Louis Vuitton store and golden luggage carts, did they walk in through the front door, past the liveried doorman like they belonged?

Did they stride into the dining room of the Oberoi like they wanted a table – dinner for three, we have no reservations.

Some might have even been working at the hotels, since they apparently knew its layout very well. At least 30 members of the staff at the Taj, including all 17 stationed at the reception desk were killed. Another dozen staff members died at the Oberoi. Guests who escaped praised the staff’s bravery at both hotels.

I don’t know who the young man in the Versace t-shirt was. But I can’t shake his image – a gunman in five-star Mumbai.

He might be an Islamic militant from Pakistan or Britain. He might be a frustrated small city boy shut out of the IT economy. He might be a village boy who trained in a terror camp somewhere.

Whatever his motive, his message was loud and clear.

Pay attention to me, he and his young partners said to booming India.

And then these mysterious young men pulled the trigger.

Boom.

(A version of this story appeared at newamericanmedia.org.)

“We wanted it to be a place where you could meet Salman Rushdie, not just read him. Before Jaipur, you might only have been able to see him at some British Council event,” said William Dalrymple, the festival’s genial host. That was just about a month ago.

This week, the festival became a place where you could neither see nor read Rushdie. You were not allowed to even see his image on a video screen. And four writers had to leave town for the “crime” of reading from Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” which is still banned in India.

Salman Rushdie would have been the biggest literary celebrity at Jaipur this year. But in his absence, he hovered over the festival like Banquo’s ghost. It was hard to find a session that didn’t mention the man. Even the posters lining the entrance seemed reminders of the guest who did not come to dinner. One quoted Lyndon B. Johnson: “A book is the best weapon against intolerance and ignorance.”

In the end, a government and a festival that provided VIP security for Oprah Winfrey was unable to even show a video link interview with Salman Rushdie. The teeming crowds on the front lawns were told that hordes of angry Muslims were marching upon the festival. Some were even inside the grounds. “We feel personally disgraced that after three weeks of struggle we had to give in to those who wish to suppress free speech,” the organizers said in a statement.

The next day the leading English language newspaper in my hometown of Kolkata carried a front-page image of a darkened television screen with the words “Sorry, no transmission because of weak spine” written across it. In a television interview broadcast later, Rushdie did not mince words. “It’s about time we understood, that if this is allowed to go on, that India will cease to be a free country, and that is something, which I think most Indians will greatly regret.” Of course, more people tuned into that interview across the country because of the protesters who shut down its broadcast in Jaipur.

The Rushdie affair unfolded, as he described it, as “a black farce.” It was as if two festivals happened at Jaipur.  On one hand there was a Jaipur Literature Festival with almost 300 writers, talking about everything from atheism to the young Stalin, from Shakespeare to Africa. It included the likes of Richard Dawkins, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid and Tom Stoppard. Rushdie might have called it the Festival of Gup (talk and debate). The other festival was the Festival of Chup (silence). It featured the chimera of Mumbai mafia hit men, silenced writers, an aborted video link and about two dozen protesters performing namaaz inside Diggi Palace, the festival venue.

Now it seems that the paid assassins who were allegedly on their way to kill Rushdie, had he come, were fabricated. It’s not even clear if reading from the “Satanic Verses” is really a criminal offense. (Some lawyers claimed that the book is banned under the Customs Act, which only prohibits its import into the country, not its reading.) Dalrymple says he was told that an 1867 statute made reading from a banned book a criminal offense. The festival could have been shut down. “The police turned up within an hour of the reading. Authors were going to be arrested. We thought we were going to spend the night in jail,” he said. Since then at least half a dozen complaints have been filed against the festival in different cities across India, complaints which could entangle everyone in cases for months to come.

Literary critic Nilanjana Roy quickly circulated a petition asking Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to consider revoking the 1988 ban on the novel, pointing out that the book has never incited violence anywhere. But given that the ruling Congress and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), were pretty much on the same side of the issue, it’s unlikely the prime minister is going to pay much attention. Even though his minister for human resources development, Kapil Sibal, was at the Jaipur festival reading from his own book of poems.

“Cherished freedoms must not be lost,” the minister recited from one of his poems, without any visible trace of irony.

In the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, some of those “cherished freedoms” seem to be endangered, if not lost. An editorial by Praveen Swami in The Hindu called what happened in Jaipur “a milestone that marked the slow motion disintegration of India’s secular state.” Rushdie might have become its cause celebre, but he is by no means the first victim, as Salil Tripathi points out in Index of Censorship. Nonagenarian painter M. F. Husain died in exile last year because his paintings offended the Hindu right wing.  A disabled gay painter was assaulted in Delhi this month because his work dealt with homosexual themes. Mumbai University withdrew Rohinton Mistry’s novel “Such a Long Journey” from its syllabus because some Marathi speakers thought their community wasn’t shown in a good light. Films about any remotely sensitive subject are routinely threatened with bans.

“But even if you can ban a film, can you ban the director?” asked Javed Akhtar, an eminent poet and Bollywood scriptwriter. Pakr Farooq, one of the protesters standing on the lawn, could not understand the difference.

“He has written the book,” he said stubbornly. “We cannot prosecute the book. He is the person liable. We do not even want to see his face. Directly or indirectly by video link.”

Farooq was staring at the giant screen as he spoke, his eyes fixed on it, as if waiting for Rushdie to materialize like a djinn.

Farooq’s “victory” could embolden many others like him, of all religious stripes, who know they can hold the state  hostage with just the threat of violence. And the state, whether it’s pusillanimous or pandering, is only too happy to succumb. “Free speech liberals literally don’t count in our democracy,” wrote my colleague Lakshmi Chaudhry on Firstpost. “There are simply not enough of us to matter to politicians on Election Day. There is no ‘liberal vote’ to be courted or appeased.”

“This is a wake up call for a class that wants to keep its hands clean all the time. They don’t understand India is a contested country. You have to roll up your sleeves and jump into the gutter,” journalist and editor Tarun Tejpal told the crowd.

He was met with resounding applause. I looked at Pakr Farooq and his friends. Their faces were impassive. They stood there with Jaipur Literature Festival day passes around their necks. It was a free festival. Everyone could attend, even those who threatened to shut it down. Every protester had his pass. On the way out, each one would turn it in to a khaki-clad security men, his day’s work done. But for now they stood there holding their ground in a sea of people who had turned up to listen to Salman Rushdie, thousands of people upset, angry and frustrated with them.

Impolitic as it was, I had to feel a sneaking sense of admiration.

I don’t know if I could have done the same if the situation had been reversed.

This essay is based on reporting conducted for Firstpost.com, an online site for news, views and analysis on India.

It’s not Gilbert’s fault but I have an instinctive reflex reaction to books about white people discovering themselves in brown places. I want to gag, shoot and leave.

In a way I almost prefer the old colonials in their pith helmets trampling over the Empire’s far-flung outposts. At least they were somewhat honest in their dealings. They wanted the gold, the cotton, and laborers for their sugar plantations. And they wanted to bring Western civilization, afternoon tea and anti-sodomy laws to godforsaken places riddled with malaria and beriberi.

The new breed is more sensitive, less overt. They want to spend a year in a faraway place on a “journey.” But the journey is all about what they can get. Not gold, cotton or indigo anymore. They want to eat, shoot films (or write books) and leave. They want the food, the spiritual wisdom, the romance. (To be fair, Elizabeth Gilbert does help her single mom Balinese healer build herself a house.)

I recently read William Dalrymple’s “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.” What I especially appreciated about the book was that it was really in the voice of his nine subjects. It was not about Dalrymple’s spiritual journey through the thickets of faith and faith healers. Dalrymple said in an interview he was suspicious of “journey” books.

“You mean like ‘Eat, Pray, Love’?” I asked.

That was a faux pas. Later I noticed that Elizabeth Gilbert had kindly given him a blurb: “honest, edifying, and moving.”

Actually, I don’t want to deny Elizabeth Gilbert her “journey.” She is herself honest, edifying and moving. I don’t want to deny her her Italian carbs, her Indian oms or her Bali Hai beach romance. We all need that sabbatical from the rut of our lives.

But as her character complained that she had “no passion, no spark, no faith” and needed to go away for one year, I couldn’t help wondering, where do those people in Indonesia and India go away to when they lose their passion, spark and faith? I don’t think they come to Manhattan. I wonder if there could be an exchange program for the passion-deprived, a sort of global spark-swap.

This is not to say “Eat, Pray, Love” just exists in a self-centered air-conditioned meditation cave and has no heart. It does have heart. It tries hard to be down with the people. So Julia Roberts rents a room in Italy whose ceiling looks like it might fall down any minute. And in India we see her with mosquito bites. Few Bollywood actresses would consent to such puffy indignities.

Of course, there is that slight problem: It is Julia Roberts.

It requires more than the normal suspension of disbelief when Julia Roberts announces she will eat that whole pizza and buy the “big girl jeans.” And we see her trying to squeeze her Julia Roberts body into her jeans, struggling with the zipper and we know this is a fine, brave actor at work.

She tries not to be the foreign tourist, but she does spend an awful lot of time with the expats whether it’s the Swede in Italy, the Texan in India or the Brazilian in Bali. The natives mostly have clearly assigned roles. Language teacher. Hangover healer. Dispenser of fortune cookie-style wisdom (knowledge is never so meaningful as when it comes in broken English, served up with puckish grins). The expats have messy histories but the natives’ lives are not very complicated (other than that teenage arranged marriage in India). They are there as the means to her self-discovery. After that is done, it’s time to book the next flight.

But all through the film this is what I was wondering. Why did Elizabeth Gilbert have to go to Italy, India and Indonesia to learn to eat, pray and love? Didn’t anyone tell her America was the one-stop shop for all of it?

The United States is where I learned about all-you-can-eat buffets (of Indian food, no less).

This is where I was constantly fussed over by kind helpful ladies in my university town who wanted to chauffeur us heathen foreign students to church on Sunday.

And this is where we finally had the independence (and the coveted room of our own) to love, away from the prying eyes of parents, cousins, servants and neighbors.

But Elizabeth Gilbert/Julia Roberts had to board three airplanes to find that in a piecemeal fashion in Italy, India, Indonesia. I wondered why she was drawn to those three countries.

Is it because they all start with I?

I, I, and I.

Not inappropriate for a film that is ultimately about I, Me and Myself.

Nothing drove that home better than what happened after the screening ended. I went down in an elevator crammed with radiant women, all discussing when they teared up during the film, and how much they related to it, and its message of opening yourself up to the world. There was one woman in a wheelchair in the elevator. After we reached the lobby, the women, still chattering, marched out into the chilly San Francisco night. The woman in the wheelchair remained stranded behind the heavy doors. 

This story was originally published by New America Media.

I have no idea if the two judges know each other, but within one week, they had suddenly brought together two parts of who I am. As a gay immigrant, I am used to juggling identities, never sure which one is acceptable in which setting, which one I should check at the door.

Now, suddenly, I feel the full weight of the U.S. Constitution behind both identities, affirming both of them. It is a rare feeling and a majestic one.

As Kamala Harris, San Francisco’s district attorney, told the crowd celebrating Judge Walker’s decision in front of San Francisco’s City Hall, “Good for us for fighting for the ideal of our country. And winning.”

Yes, both victories are just rest stops in much bigger fights. Both fights are probably headed for an uncertain future in the U.S. Supreme Court. But until today I didn’t realize that in some ways it’s the same fight. Supervisor David Campos told the cheering crowd that this was about “justice for all” — not just “gays and lesbians, but immigrants and minorities and transgender.”

That can sound like San Francisco big umbrella talk. But these cases touch each other in ways I didn’t realize. My numerologist friend said, “Of course they do, the digits in 1070 add up to, you guessed it, 8.”

But there is a deeper connection.

Both issues are resulting in a patchwork of laws, happening state by state. In one case, it is because of the lack of comprehensive immigration reform at the federal level. In the other it’s because of the Defense of Marriage Act at the federal level. Democrats are nervous about both issues, trying to walk a fine political line. Both have become electoral tripwires even when not on the ballot. And as Out4Immigration’s Amos Lim points out, binational gay and lesbian couples are caught in the gap between the two. Gay marriage in California will not help them until there is immigration reform in Washington.

The fight over Proposition 8 in California rested on the 14th Amendment of the U.S. constitution. What Judge Walker found was Proposition 8 violated the due process and equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

The fight over illegal immigration is about federal jurisdiction and states’ rights but it also boils down to the 14th Amendment. That’s the grand prize, the Holy Grail that the Russell Pearces of Arizona are really aiming to overturn. Pearce wrote in an e-mail obtained by CBS 5 News: “I also intend to push for an Arizona bill that would refuse to accept or issue a birth certificate that recognizes citizenship to those born to illegal aliens, unless one parent is a citizen.”

When I became a citizen of the United States I learned about the amendments to the Constitution. But those were just words in a civics lesson. Standing in front of San Francisco’s City Hall, its golden dome glowing dully in the gray foggy evening, surrounded by hugging couples, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, black ministers and Asian lesbians, all carrying signs that said “Justice,” I realized that the equal protection clause means something, that the due process clause means something, the citizenship clause means something. Something real that was about me. And the man next to me hugging his shivering dog. And the two women next to him with their arms around each other. That clause once meant to give the children of slaves real citizenship rights in America was protecting all of us as well.

Perhaps that was why Eva Paterson, the civil rights lawyer who heads Equal Justice Society, told the crowd that when she heard the ruling she felt “the sense of shackles dropping.”

I don’t know how many people in that audience made that connection. The good thing about living in a bubble like San Francisco is when a ruling like this comes down there are always enough of us to shut down the main street of the city and march down it, placards waving. Every window along the way was open, and people leaned out taking photographs with their iPhones. The marchers looked up and photographed them back with their iPhones. This was instant community. iPhones had become wePhones.

The bad thing about living in a bubble like San Francisco is we don’t make those larger connections. When Proposition 8 squeaked to victory, the marriage equality campaign was faulted for not reaching out more to immigrants, to communities of color, to black ministers and Chinese churches. Why were there Yes on 8 ads in Spanish language media? Where were the No on 8 ads? Minutes after the verdict was announced EqualityCalifornia sent out an e-mail blast exhorting its supporters to donate money for the fight ahead. Hopefully they’ll remember these fights are not disconnected.

If the twin judgments show anything it’s this. Though the crowd that celebrated Bolton’s decision in Phoenix might look different from the crowd celebrating Walker’s ruling, these are sisters under the skin. As Paterson reminded the crowd, “It’s the same law that gave equality and protection to immigrants in Arizona.”

It is the same law. That’s worth remembering. It’s not just a victory for same-sex marriage. Or immigrant rights.

It’s a victory for the law. The same Constitution, and the same amendment, protects all of us. Hopefully the gay community and the immigrant community will remember that in the fight ahead.

Because as the young Asian woman blocked at an intersection in her Grand Cherokee, as the hundreds of marchers passed by, said with a smile, “It’s about time.”

And the gray-haired lady, who looked like her mother, sitting next to her, beamed and nodded and gave us the thumbs up.

A version of this story was originally published by New America Media.

“We were applying the lessons of the Obama campaign,” says Hogarth as the polls closed in Biddeford, Maine. “The No on 8 campaign was a top-down Hillary Clinton-style campaign. This was more of a bottom-up Obama-style campaign.”

In California, activists are split over whether to take on same-sex marriage again in 2010 or 2012. Maine, for many, was the dress rehearsal. “Maine might be different from California but the National Organization for Marriage in Maine (which opposed same-sex marriage) waged a cookie cutter campaign,” says Rick Jacobs, chairman of the Courage Campaign, which is considering a push to repeal Proposition 8 in 2010. “They even used the same TV ad.”

Now marriage equality supporters are having to come to terms with another loss. Same-sex marriage in Maine was repealed 53 percent to 47 percent according to latest numbers.

In California, the fight against Proposition 8 had been led by Equality California. The organization, which had been heavily criticized by many in the LGBT rights community for how it handled the No on 8 campaign, had tried to be on the offensive in Maine. They had sent 11 field staff to Maine. They had run phone banks from California that had made over 60,000 calls. “People took a day off work to make those calls,” says Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California. “A lot of people said they had wished they had done more against Prop. 8.”

“When something bad happens, and people’s rights are taken away, that’s when a movement is galvanized,” says Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign. Courage Campaign set up its own phone banks in the Bay Area in people’s houses. They had four full-time staff in Maine and 11 volunteers. “We did not budget for this,” says Jacobs. “The 11 volunteers raised their own money. We raised over $60,000 from members that went directly to the campaign.”

It was looking good. For the first time, the marriage equality folks were ahead in fundraising early in the campaign. Protect Maine Equality raised $4 million, compared with $2.5 million for Stand for Marriage Maine. Equality Maine had learned from the hits the No on 8 campaign had taken in California. When the first ads about schoolchildren learning about gay marriage showed up in Maine, they were ready with a counter ad featuring Maine’s teacher of the year.

Now with Maine voters having struck down same-sex marriage, activists in California are wondering what lessons to take back home. John Bare, a San Francisco resident who is part of a donor circle that gives money to marriage equality campaigns nationwide, cautions against reading too much into the today-Maine, tomorrow-California theories.

“Maine is in no way scalable up to California,” says Bare. “Maine is French Catholic, white, middle- and upper-class.” It also has the population of the size of San Diego. When marriage equality campaigners wanted to target their message to a precise demographic they found a French Catholic grandmother and her gay son and his longtime partner. “In California we need messages for Latino immigrants and Cantonese immigrants,” says Bare. “We need more tailoring than we could afford.”

Paul Hogarth agrees. “In California there was a serious problem with outreach to communities of color. Whatever happens in Maine, we will still have that problem in California. And a lot of liberal, progressive groups are not good at reaching these communities,” he says.

But he is optimistic that some good will come out of Maine. “The campaign learned how to listen to the grass roots. It reached out to people outside the gay havens. They did not let the opposition own the religion issue. Or the children issue.”

He says, unlike in California in 2008, he at least feels he did everything he could to save same-sex marriage in Maine.

Bare worries that the loss in Maine, coupled with the recent resignation of the chairs of the National Equality March, will be a double blow for the movement. “I think the energy might go out of many who want to go to the ballot in 2010,” says Bare.

The Courage Campaign is still studying the results of a massive survey of the state’s voters to see if it makes sense to launch a push for marriage equality in 2010, says Jacobs.

But Kors of Equality California says despite putting the best face on it, “losing is always devastating. Never before has a majority voted on a minority’s right. It’s time for that to end.”

A version of this story was originally published by New America Media.

 But now the center of gravity is shifting. In the wake of the court decision on the legality of Proposition 8 (as opposed to its righteousness) there will be protests and candlelight marches and angry rhetoric. Already I am getting the faxes and e-mails. But perhaps it could also be a time for those of us who have been used to the world looking at us, to look out at the world instead. The pot of gold is shifting to the other end of the rainbow.

 In India, Bollywood actor and model Celina Jaitley has a blog on the Times of India Web site calling for equal rights for gays. In Durban, South Africa, Joe Singh and his partner, Wesley Nolan, married each other. A Hindu priest officiated. Nolan put a Lord Ganesha pendant around Singh’s neck to remove obstacles and ward off evils.

 In a few years some young activist in South Asia might be mystified why the world’s first group for LGBT South Asians was born all the way out in California. “Don’t move to Kathmandu,” his aunt will say. “It has Maoists and gays.”

 It’s true. A small conservative country like Nepal is considering same-sex marriage. A few years ago the Maoists had dismissed the notion of homosexuality as a bourgeois affectation, irrelevant in the revolution. In 2008 the Maoist prime minister sent Sunil Pant, founder of Nepal’s only gay rights group and by now its first openly gay member of parliament, to New York to sign the U.N. resolution calling for a worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality. (The U.S. declined to vote on that resolution at that time.)

 How did that happen? Pant said when the fight for the movement for democracy took to the streets his group was right there in the trenches. “In 2006 democracy was more important than fighting for LGBTQ rights. We don’t have to hide ourselves in some kind of shadow,” he said. “But we needed to show how our movement would benefit overall democracy.”

 In California right now the economy might be more important than LGBT rights. Gay activists would do well to read Pant’s handbook. There are a lot of bruising fights shaping up over budget cuts that will affect healthcare, education, social services — all issues that will hit communities of color the hardest. These are the same communities that the gay rights marriage campaign in California was accused of ignoring in the lead-up to Proposition 8. This could be a chance for a gay movement to become more inclusive, to turn a protest rally into a real movement.

 When I was in Kathmandu earlier this month, the Maoist-led government had collapsed (though not over gay marriage). Red flag-waving Maoist supporters were parading down the streets of Kathmandu, chanting slogans. South Asia’s newest democracy was in turmoil, struggling to find direction. I don’t know whether gay rights and same-sex marriage will get lost in the chaos. But even if they do suffer a setback, the lessons of Nepal are quite clear.

 ”We needed to show how our movement would benefit overall democracy.”

 It’s a good one for California’s gay activists to heed. Otherwise California will no longer be the future. It will be the place tourists come to gawk at the most exclusive club of all — the 18,000 same-sex couples whose marriages the court left standing — as if they are some rare endangered animals in a sanctuary. And then they will heave a sigh of relief, shake their heads at the quaintness of it all and go back to their happily married gay lives in places like Iowa, Connecticut and Maine. And Nepal.

A version of this story was originally published by New America Media.