Conversations between movements, collaborations across identities, 10 years on

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit Kolkata for the first time. I was in town to do some research and made my way to the office of Varta Trust in South Kolkata to meet Pawan Dhall, one of its founders. After offering me a cup of coffee, he placed three huge binders on the glass-topped table that separated us in a cubicle. Thick sheafs of neatly stacked paper started back at me. This is only a small part of our history, Pawan said, offering that I take the binders to the adjoining cubicle, when not occupied by his colleague, Swati, to read. Over the next few days, that is what I did.

Before my eyes I saw how Counsel Club (CC), started by seven gay and bisexual men (including Pawan) in 1993 as a safe space, grew over the years. In 1999, some members of the group started Integration, a registered society, to “address crucial issues like sexual health, resources development and provision of legal support in an organised manner,” as an editorial in Counsel Club’s newsletter Naya Pravartak put it.

I also came across letters exchanged in the 1990s between Counsel Club’s members and LGBT activists from Patna, Mumbai and other cities, establishing networks of connection and conversation. Naya Pravartak was one of the earliest newsletters to be published by an LGBT support group in India (Bombay Dost, first published in 1990, preceded it by a few years), but there were others too and often, the groups exchanged newsletters, too.

One binder had documents from the early 1990s (the Delhi-based AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan – ABVA’s 1992 demonstration against police brutality towards LGBT people) to the early 2000s (the 172nd report of the Law Commission of India), many of which attested to the fact that vigorous discussions around Section 377, the colonial law that criminalized homosexuality, and the impact it had on the lives of LGBT people, were taking place within the community. Today, we understand the importance of an intersectional approach in human rights issues, but some of the earliest intersections around Section 377 date back to the 1990s, as the documents in the binder clearly revealed.

Graphic credit: Arkadeepra Purkayastha

Propelled by the Delhi High Court’s refusal to expand the definition of the rape laws, as they then stood, in a child sexual abuse case, Sakshi, a Delhi-based legal rights NGO, submitted a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court of India. The apex court asked the Law Commission to look into the matter, as a result of which the 172nd Law Commission report suggested a radical proposal of not only expanding the definition of rape from the narrow confines of peno-vaginal assault, but also doing away with Section 377, and, contentiously, making rape a gender-neutral crime.

The National Commission on Women’s Status formed a committee to draft a sexual assault Bill, which was circulated among several LGBT support groups, leading to some of the earliest discussions within these groups on same-sex violence as well as the problematic issue of making an assault law gender neutral in a patriarchal society driven by homophobia, and where the age of consent was not uniform, the idea of marital rape was not considered, nor was the age of the perpetrator given much thought.

Sakshi, which was part of the drafting of the Bill, sparked a debate that saw many LGBT support groups engage with the matter. Counsel Club wrote an email drawing attention to the lack of nuance surrounding the age of consent; PRISM from Delhi lauded the effort but said that simply bringing same-sex violence into the legal framework without a larger, systemic understanding of the homophobic, patriarchal context in which it occurs, would do more harm than good.

Emails and hand-written letters exchanged between LGBT activists attest to how these issues were debated – some thought a gender-neutral law would benefit the community as it would also include within its ambit the assault on boys; women’s groups argued that gender neutrality took away the protection that the law accorded to women and such a provision also left LGBT persons vulnerable to a punitive justice system.

In 2001, after the Law Commission had submitted its report, several child’s rights, women’s rights and LGBT rights groups met in December in Delhi that year and discussed several of these issues. “While everyone agreed that a gender-neutral law is essential to address CSA [child sexual abuse], everyone also expressed concern about its adverse implications for women and sexual minorities,” an article published in Mirch Masala, a magazine brought out by Sangini, a lesbian and bisexual women’s rights group, stated.

The Law Commission’s recommendation to do away with Section 377 was not the first time such an appeal had been made. Seven years earlier, in 1994, ABVA had filed a petition in the Delhi High Court seeking the same thing in its prayer. The petition eventually did not proceed beyond preliminary hearings, but its existence, accompanied by the ABVA’s own activism, showed that discrimination based on sexuality was a lived experience that many had begun to raise their voices against. Sakshi’s petition, and later the draft sexual assault Bill, also showed how Section 377, and the discourse around sexuality itself, could not be limited to LGBT groups – and, at the same time, could not be resolved without taking them into account.

This then was the nascent queer movement’s first forays into intersectionality, and recognition that such an approach meant more than finding common ground. We see disparate groups expanding their understanding of their own politics, needs, and contestations with society and State precisely because of how others were also affected by the same things.

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The binders I encountered in Varta Trust’s office are significant for two reasons.

One, they speak to the sheer importance of documentation and archiving. Two, these binders hold history, and history – if we are willing to listen – has a lot to teach us. For instance, it helps us recognize that change of any sort, whether legal or social, is accretive and collaborative – dialogue and disagreements are essential.

The queer communities were (and are) seeking to be read as citizens with equal rights, and the process, with the marriage equality petitions pending before the Supreme Court, is an ongoing one. However, we were not the only communities fighting for equal recognition before the law. In all the years that we fought the battle against Section 377 in court, dispossessed Adivasis sought to overturn a colonial mindset and reclaim their land for themselves. They, too, won. Sex workers won the right to protect themselves against arbitrary arrest (one of the few protections they possess till date), and people living with HIV won the right to privacy and public health cover.

Ten years from now, my hope is that the binders only grow thicker with more documentation, which people like Pawan, and others around the country, preserve and archive. I also hope that these binders contain within them pages of interactions between queer communities and other marginalized, dispossessed groups, and other people’s movements – whether we are debating the finer points of the law or its impact on different communities, or seeking constitutionally mandated rights unavailable to sections of our populations.

The idea of being a citizen is, at its root, an inclusive one. We know this because we have fought for it.

About the main photo: Archival records maintained by Varta Trust on the sociolegal campaigns against Section 377, Indian Penal Code since the early 1990s. Photo credit: Pawan Dhall