How Woke Activism Is Killing The Queer Cause In India

Queer activism in India is currently at a crossroads.

The last decade has seen significant developments on the legislative as well as the judicial front.

These developments have been celebrated in India and around the world and have paved the foundation for an evolving framework protecting LGBTQIA+ rights.

It was hoped that these developments would initiate a focussed and constructive approach in charting the future course.

Instead, the activism space is now being dominated by those who are more concerned with politicking rather than a grassroots-based inclusive movement for queer rights.

If you are a queer activist in 2020, it is not enough for you to have a focussed approach of advancing rights of the diverse SOGIESC communities.

You need to align yourself with the emerging collective of woke activists who would rather focus on geo-strategic issues (read Kashmir) or India’s citizenship law (read CAA-NRC protest) than actually engaging with the community on issues which directly affect them.

The ‘Personal’ is not always ‘Political’

As an intersex activist who has spent almost a decade in creating a space for gender-queer, intersex and LGBTI Indians in the public discourse, I am deeply worried about the politicking on this subject.

Queer activists are following the dangerous lead of ‘human rights activists’ and are associating themselves with political entities with extremist and maximalist agendas.

This is neither to denigrate the importance of political engagement for advancing rights of the LGBTI community nor to undermine the value of being politically conscious as an individual.

As a citizen living in a democracy, it is important for us to give voice to our political opinions.

At the same time, we need to be conscious of consequences of political expression when we are coming together as a community for a specific purpose.

The elite class of woke activists have little to lose in this process. Their privilege insulates them from any kind of negative consequences. However, one cannot underestimate the impact that such politicisation can have on the larger LGBTI community.

Given the kind of diverse identities in this space, it is important to challenge the current paradigm where one section of the activists is claiming to be political spokespersons on behalf of the community.

It is critical to reflect, at this juncture, as to what are the priorities for the queer movement and how it should proceed.

In this regard, we need to interrogate whether the excessively politicised nature of collective activism is doing any good to the community at large and if it can claim to represent the diversity of queer voices in India.

Further, it is also critical to ensure that politicking is not done at the expense of the unity in the community.

Currently, we are at a nascent stage of queer liberation in India and therefore, as a community, it is important to prioritise various challenges faced by the community.

The problem with ‘woke’ activism

The direction in which queer activism is going needs to be examined in the historical context of the queer movement in India.

For years, the academic and media discourse on queer issues has been focussed on one particular law i.e. Section 377 which criminalised homosexuality.

It was a colonial law which was unfortunately not discontinued after India gained Independence.

While it was important to fight this battle, disproportionate focus on this law has led to an erasure of the multiple human rights violations faced by the diverse identities which are homogenised under the umbrella of LGBTI+ community.

Their issues are never given enough attention in the popular or academic discourse. This has resulted into a systematic ‘invisiblisation’ of diverse queer identities whose lived traditions have survived for centuries.

The 2009 Delhi High Court judgment was a major landmark in the queer movement in India. Post this judgment, several journalists and academics started owning their queer identity in the public sphere.

Still, the narrative around queer issues continued to be focussed around issues related to sexual orientation.

In contrast, queer movement in several other countries had expanded and began a conversation around issues related to gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics.

The 2014 NALSA judgment did initiate a discussion on rights of transgender persons, but the discourse was still rooted in hetero-normative notions of gender.

To this date, there is hardly any discussion about intersex people in the media.

Instead of aiming to set the discourse on the right path, the knowledge base of today’s ‘woke’ activists is comprised of pious rhetoric and reactionary thoughts posted on social media.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media is all in praise of such activists as they lend ‘legitimacy’ due to their identity.

However, it needs to be remembered that just because someone belongs to the community, it doesn’t necessarily make them an authority of the issues of the community.

It is further disheartening that those who possess a layered understanding of the issues from the grassroots are demeaned or excluded.

As I have highlighted earlier, fear and intimidation are commonly used tactics by these ‘woke’ activists who are incapable of understanding the diversity within the community.

In a country where the conversation around gender and sexuality takes place in a hush-hush manner, woke activists are not willing to address the root of the problem.

We are well-aware about the state of affairs in our education system when it comes to issues related to sex and gender.

In our schools, lessons in biology relating to the reproductive system are skipped.

Even in our higher education system i.e. our universities, there is hardly any nuance when it comes to queer issues.

These are some hard realities which need to be given due attention. Instead of focussing on these issues, the ‘woke’ activists are interested in the political angle.

Pink List India is a case in point.

Before going further, it is important to briefly describe the aim of Pink List India.

It is an online platform curated by few young people and it aims to track the public stand taken by Indian MPs on LGBTI issues.

So far, so good.

It starts to look problematic when one examines the manner in which this database has been curated.

As is common with such evaluative platforms, it is instructive for the curators to devise a methodology and make it publicly available.

Having a well-designed methodology goes a long way in ensuring transparency and accountability of the platform.

At the end of the day, it is a platform devised by human beings who are surely likely to have political views.

Therefore, it is a question of research ethics as well, Curators must be open about their political affiliations and political views so as to avoid appearance and practice of any kind of biases.

After all, this is a deeply sensitive subject.

However, the database created by Pink List India fails on each of these accounts. There is no mention of any kind of methodology which has been adopted, except for a few descriptive sentences which talk about the aims of the database.

The curators are known to be openly political.

Still, there are no disclosures of any kind on the website which can inform the visitors and researchers about the possibility of biases.

The biggest issue with the database is that it is entirely based on media reports and that too, mostly limited to English news media.

This is a huge gap in terms of the coverage of this database.

The reportage in regional news media also needs to be taken into account while preparing any such database.

The sorry state of affairs with respect to reporting standards on sensitive issues like LGBTI rights is very well-known.

As of now, the awareness of even some of the most ‘eminent’ journalists and authors is half-baked.

To this date, there are hardly any LGBTI organisations in India which have tried to train journalists on queer issues.

At Srishti Madurai, we have made a concerted attempt since the inception of the movement to ensure that journalists are properly trained to report on queer rights. We organised several workshops to ensure that journalists are aware about the diversity within the LGBTI community.

The lack of awareness within the media is exemplified by the news reporting on queer issues.

Even after several judicial pronouncements, only issues related to trans-queer women were given attention.

To address this anomaly, we consciously ensured that issues related to trans-men, intersex people, genderqueer persons are also given due recognition.

Given the fact that this is the awareness level amongst journalists, one can only imagine the awareness level in the political class.

In such a situation where the political class is not even aware of the basics of gender and sexuality, it is rather unrealistic to expect that they would have knowledge about queer rights.

In spite of such glaring flaws in the design of the platform, the platform has not been scrutinised at all for the absence of any methodology or the apparent political bias of the curators.

The result is for all of us to see.

In the past two months, the mainstream media has had a field day feeding us stories as to how one political party (read BJP) is not inclusive enough when it comes to representing the cause of LGBTI Indians.

While the curators have publicly maintained that their platform does not endorse any particular party, they have not been forthright when ill-considered conclusions are being drawn by journalists on the basis of their database.

For instance, here is one infographic by a leading newspaper which was prepared by analysing the database prepared by Pink List India.

Now, these are some seriously sweeping remarks which need to be questioned, given the flawed research design of the database prepared by Pink List India.

Terminologies used in any such platform is very critical and, therefore, the absence of any glossary on the Pink List India website needs to be called out as it can have exclusionary outcomes for the diverse SOGIESC communities.

A platform which is enabling perception of this kind in the media should be more transparent about its methodology.

Else, such initiatives have the potential of creating a rift within the community and also alienating fence-sitters among legislators.

Defining an independent agenda for queer movement

Since the 1980s, involvement of western funding organisations in the human rights movement has increased manifold.

As a consequence, the narrative on most critical issues is defined by those who are patronised by such organisations.

Unfortunately, much like the narrative on most human rights issues, the narrative on gender and sexuality in India has become hostage of the Left-Right ideological binary, which has no relevance in the Indian context.

These outcomes are inevitable if one chooses to only focus on the political angle. As a result, fundamental virtues of ethical and committed activism are being compromised and the community is suffering because of it.

In the earlier section, a threadbare analysis of a recently developed database was carried out with a view to highlight the importance of grassroots-based activism as opposed to initiatives which only appear to be substantive.

No one can deny that we need to educate the people at large about issues related to gender and sexuality.

Our political class is nothing but a mirror image of the society we have.

Therefore, it is critical to prioritise awareness on LGBTI issues over everything else.

On a personal note, Srishti Madurai — a student volunteer movement I started — has always focussed on creating awareness on such issues from the school level to the level of MPs.

Similar initiatives are imperative to educate people from every walk of life.

Here, it is important to be mindful that the awareness material must be available in Indian languages as well.

Given this context, it is important to appreciate the diversity of queer voices in India from the grassroots and work towards building an inclusive environment which takes into account issues of each of the diverse SOGIESC identities and help in coming together as a community if they don’t have it already.

If we are to argue for queer liberation in the true sense and resist forced conformity, we must reflect on the manner in which activism is being done on issues of LGBTI people in India and focus more on educating the people rather than politicking.