India's health minister has sparked a furious row over comments in which he described homosexuality as a disease

Ghulam Nabi Azad told a conference on HIV/AIDS that gay sex was unnatural. Gay sex was decriminalized in India in a landmark judgement in 2009 but anti-homosexual discrimination remains widespread. Azad told the meeting in Delhi that homosexuality is a disease which has come from other countries. He said that men having sex with other men should not happen, but does. According to one estimate, some 8% of homosexual men in India are infected with HIV. There is an infection rate of under 1% in the general population.