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Our third speaker who is with us today is Gitanjali Misra from India, is a co founder and executive director of CRE A, an international feminist human rights organisation based in the Global South. She has worked as an activist, a grant maker and a policy maker on issues of sexuality, reproductive health, gender, human rights and violence against [00:00:30] women. She co founded Saki, which means woman friend for South Asian women. It's an NGO based in New York, committed to ending violence against women of South Asian origin. Gitanjali sits on a number of boards, including the International Advisory Board for the Global Fund for Women and Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice, based in the Netherlands. She writes extensively on issues of sexuality, gender [00:01:00] and rights and co edited sexuality, gender and rights, exploring theory and practise in South and Southeast Asia. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to our third presenter. Good morning, everybody, and thank you to Barry and the organisers for inviting me to be here. It's a privilege and an honour. [00:01:30] So now I have a stop watch because I've gone from 25 to 20 minutes and I have some clips so I'm going to be looking for some technical support to get this going. So I'm going to present a snapshot of the LGBT movement in India and I'm going to focus my talk a lot more on the lesbian movement because I can only give a snapshot. It is India. It's diverse. It's 1 billion people, OK, just [00:02:00] as the previous speaker said, They say it like it is we in India never say it like it is. We have 1 billion people and we never talk about sex leave alone heterosexual sex. Uh so therefore, the LGBTI movement has come out of a very complicated context, and I don't want to be labelled the context. But the Indian society is very traditional and LGBT. Individuals have often been stereotyped as coming only from educated [00:02:30] westernised elites. With those from poorer and more marginalised groups usually seen as victims of the sex work industry rather than people exercising choices. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism in the past two decades has made the environment more challenging. Still, the BJP party that's a sign and its followers, including women, have promoted the idea of the chased married heterosexual [00:03:00] woman as a symbol of pure India, with anyone contravening these ideals as beyond the pale and persecuted. On the other hand, there have been some advantages, and that facilitated the rise of a new social movement. Firstly, civil society in India is traditionally very strong, and the women's movement, which would eventually produce a number of lesbian activists, was very prominent and well organised. Secondly, from [00:03:30] the late 19 eighties, India received significant funding for HIV AIDS prevention efforts, which helped bring LGBT issues into the fore. And it persuaded some policymakers that ostracising these groups would be counterproductive and more likely to spread HIV than curtail it. But even these advantages were mixed blessings. The women's movement was very reluctant to engage with lesbian issues in the early days, and the relationship [00:04:00] between the two movements was often hostile. Feminists felt that women had much bigger problems than those faced by a small number of lesbians and bisexual women, and that associating themselves with lesbians might allow the Hindu right to tarnish feminism and reverse the wider gains they had made. So LGBT activists were not allowed to talk at national conferences of women's movements, for example, when feminists did [00:04:30] strain to same sex sexuality. They mainly talked about the lesbian sphere as a site of violence rather than about the positive and pleasurable aspects of same sex. Love and desire and the right to such relationships. And the HIV AIDS movement was also a mixed blessing as it had a tendency to medicalize same sex sexuality rather than looking at the social context or the positive side of relationships. This tended to enhance the image of [00:05:00] lesbians and other minority groups as victims in need of treatment rather than agents with control over their lives who sought acceptance by society as the best medicine. These constraints and the pressure of tradition meant that the lesbian movement in India was later in getting off the ground than it had been in some Western countries. And although there had been some signs of life during the 19 eighties, it was really a [00:05:30] series of events that provided the spark for more concerted action. The first of these events was a same sex marriage between two policewomen in a small town in central India. This was widely reported in the newspapers and resulted in the two women being losing their jobs, but their family and friends supported them. And the widespread reporting of the story made other lesbian women across the country come out and [00:06:00] realised that they were not alone, that abuse and prejudice were not inevitable if they came out. And that same sex relationships were not the exclusive preserve of wealthy women from the big westernised cities. After the story broke, several other reports of women marrying began began to emerge, along with a number of tragic stories about same sex couples committing suicide of women and girls whose social stigma [00:06:30] were preventing them from being together. Although none of these women were part of a movement, their stories began to raise awareness and encourage would be activists. That mobilisation might be possible. Then came the famous film Fire, which, really and if you'll excuse the pun, set the movement a light. The film is about a relationship between two women who escape their oppressive marriages by falling in love with each [00:07:00] other and beginning a serious sexual relationship. The women were named Radha and Sika, who are popular figures in Hindu mythology. The film directly challenged the particular the patriarchal Hindu construction of the pure chased heterosexual woman. It was released overseas in 1996 and in India in 1998. Many people were surprised it passed the censor board because although there had [00:07:30] been some queer films before, they had never attempted to reach a mainstream audience. When it was released, fire attracted huge audiences and sparked an enormous amount of discussion. I'm going to show you a one minute clip of fire, so the woman in the red is also a member of Parliament. But she doesn't really talk about lesbian issues. Um, [00:08:00] she talks about slum people in poverty and many other social issues, but not so. But she did do that film, Uh, and it did make her famous. So the film Fire also sparked a serious backlash. The women's wing of the Hindu fundamentalist party, the Shiv Sena, disrupted screening of the film in Bombay and Delhi by vandalising movie theatres and tearing down advertising posters, and [00:08:30] they threatened to stop the film from being screened across the country. The protesters argued that the film was perverted and that lesbianism was not part of Indian and especially Hindu culture. At first, the film's supporters were taken aback by all this, but they soon regrouped and fought back, and for the first time, LGBTI individuals came out onto the streets of Delhi and Bombay in organised groups to protest. So we do have [00:09:00] to thank the for forcing us to come together. These counter Attackers argued that homosexuality was part of Hindu culture and that the Sh Sena's image of India did not match reality. Lesbian groups in India held candle light protests and meetings and marches, and in Bombay there were sit ins in front of movie theatres that had stopped showing the film. Posters were put up around the city and there was a 300 women march which received [00:09:30] widespread media coverage. Gay men had begun to agitate publicly for change six years earlier when an organisation working on HIV AIDS organised a rally in Delhi against police harassment of gay men. But this was the first time lesbians had a visible public presence in India in the wake of fire groups like the Campaign for Lesbian Rights in India and prison emerged to make the demands for improved rights [00:10:00] more concrete and formal. Kari's aim was to raise awareness of lesbianism and dispel the myths surrounding it, as well as advocating for lesbian rights and among Prism's major achievements had been to persuade feminists that sexuality is an issue that should concern them, and that because sexuality is used by patriarchal societies as a tool to control women, feminists should work on these issues even if they themselves are heterosexual. [00:10:30] Much of this early work was about reacting to harms and injustice, such as lesbian suicides or of attempted repression of lesbians by the But as the lesbian movement grew, it forged links with organisations representing gay and bisexual men, and as LGBT activism became more organised, the objectives became bigger and the movement soon turned its focus to section 377 of the [00:11:00] Indian Penal code. There is a whole workshop this afternoon on 377 that Sumi is leading tomorrow, so hopefully some of the details of it will be covered there. But Section 377 was authored by Lord McCauley, the president of the Indian Law Commission, In 18 60 it was part of Britain's attempt to impose Victorian values on the biggest colony on its biggest colony. The law was still in place at the turn [00:11:30] of the millennium. And there are numerous documented cases of the law being used as a weapon to harass, threaten and blackmail LGBT individuals and groups. While the law wasn't used that often to bring successful prosecutions as it was difficult to prove that carnal Interros against the order of nature had taken place in private, it created a climate of criminality around sexual minority groups. [00:12:00] Just the threat of arrest could be used by the authorities to discriminate against LGBT people. For example, in the state of Gujarat, a woman underwent a sex change and married a woman and was subject of a high court petition calling for criminal action under Section 3 77 on the grounds that she was still a woman and therefore engaging in a lesbian relationship. 377 also [00:12:30] made life difficult for groups working on HIV AIDS to reach people who might be at risk. In 2001, 4 activists working on HIV aids in in a small town called Luck now had been distributing pamphlets and condoms to gay men and whose work was recognised by the state AIDS control agency were accused of running a gay sex club, and they were charged under section 377. There was a case where a group of physicians recommended that condoms [00:13:00] be distributed in a Delhi prison where there were high reported rates of homosexual sex. The prison authorities refused because homosexual sex is a crime under section 377 and distributing condoms would mean condoning a criminal act. So the LGBTI movement mobilised to have this part of the law read down. This had been first attempted before fire by a group representing gay men, but the petition they made to the Delhi High Court [00:13:30] withered and was forgotten about. Then, in 2001, the Nars Foundation India Trust, another Delhi NGO whose workers had suffered police harassment during HIV education campaigns among marginalised communities, joined with the lawyers collective, a legal organisation working for the rights of people affected by HIV AIDS. They petitioned the Delhi High Court to read down section 377 to exclude private consensual [00:14:00] sex between adults. Child rights groups were opposed to the entire law being repealed. As it is, only it is the only law under which some types of sexual abuse of minors can be prosecuted after some legal wrangling. A coalition of NGOs working on human rights issues called Voices Against 377 joined the petition. This was an important alliance because 377 the voices against 377 brought together a large [00:14:30] number of NGOs working to strengthen gay, lesbian and transgender rights, along with child rights activists, feminist groups and other human rights groups. As the momentum grew, new groups which had been isolated and reticent to make themselves known, came forward to join up and add their voices. So the coalition was able to provide stories from people whose lives had been torn apart by fear of prosecution and blackmail from police and others who [00:15:00] took advantage of the law. These testimonials showed how damaging the law was, and they made such an impression on the judges that they were quoted in the final judgement. So this 377 campaign, like the film fire before it was a rallying point which strengthened the LGBT movement and gave it a greater profile and a stronger organisation. This was helped by voices against 370 seven's decision to shift the focus [00:15:30] of the petition from a health based case to a human rights case. It no longer focused the case on issues of morality or what constitutes natural sex. But it brought consent to the fore and highlighted the discrepancies between 377 and the guarantees of the Indian Constitution to respect privacy, liberty and non discrimination. By doing this, they were able to include other movements not strictly related to [00:16:00] LGBT rights in their cause. The campaign's advocacy strategy was based on large scale demonstrations press conferences. There was a Million Voices Campaign which gathered issues of thousands of signatures opposed to section 377 including the signatures of many who were directly affected by the law. The lawyers collective organised a lot of meetings with uh with legal advocacy groups and local groups in major cities, [00:16:30] So the judgement came on July 2nd 2009 after an eight year campaign. The Delhi High Court ruled that the provision of seat three, Section 377 in India's penal code that criminalises private consensual sex between same sex adults violates the country's constitution. and international human rights conventions. The two judges ruled that consensual sex amongst its amongst adults is legal, which includes even gay sex. [00:17:00] That's part of the judgement. I'm not going to read that. But the judges also said that where society can display inclusiveness and understanding, such persons can be assured of life of dignity and non discrimination. They said, In our view, the Indian constitutional law does not permit the statutory criminal law to be held captive by the popular misconceptions of who the LGBT people are. It cannot be forgotten that discrimination [00:17:30] is antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster the dignity of every individual. So what next? Even though the ruling has sparked massive celebrations across the country by LGBT groups who saw DECRIMINALISATION as a major step towards acceptance by society, there's still a lot of work to be done. Angeli Gopalan, the executive director of the Nars Foundation, [00:18:00] said. We have finally entered the 21st century the judgement that decriminalises adult consensual same sex sexual activity is one of the positive steps that have been taken towards affirming the rights of LGBT persons in India, but we have a long way to go legally. For example, family and employment law may continue to discriminate against people based on their sexual preference. We don't know if same sex Indian couples will be able to marry or adopt [00:18:30] Children, or how inheritance and tax laws will apply for same sex couples or whether workplace discrimination will be outlawed. And we don't know if such laws will be strictly enforced. Social change is needed, and we need to basically take the the content of the judgement and publicise it much more. We need to disseminate the message of 377 and embed its vision of greater tolerance into society. And there is a lot of work going on [00:19:00] to achieve this. This is now. Currently there are lots of marches in every cities. There are support groups for LGBT people. Lots of books have been written about sexuality. There are books that exist in regional languages that have come out. A lot of Bollywood movies have now queer themes, and these are all parts of this thriving movement. The LGBT community is becoming more visible, but there is still a long way to go [00:19:30] and of course, as the religious rights outrage responses to the 377 judgement shows, The LGBTI in movement in India has advanced some distance down the road once mapped out by Gandhi, who, although far from being a sexual radical, knew a few things about activism. First, they ignore you, he said, And then they laugh at you and then they fight you. Then you win. I like to think we've reached the third stage, [00:20:00] at least, thank you very much, no.
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