Gaysia (36 page)

Out of exhaustion and anger, Naz teamed up with the Delhi-based non-profit Lawyers Collective in 1995. The timing was canny: Lawyers Collective had just been funded to work specifically on HIV issues and shared the belief that Section 377 could be repealed on both civil rights and public health grounds. If Section 377 was repealed, they felt, it would decrease HIV rates dramatically. Once the ban on homosexual sex was lifted, you could speak openly about it and educate people about safe sex. Lawyers Collective had already drafted the petition for repeal and just needed a responsible party to file it. In 2001, Anjali filed the petition with the Delhi High Court in the Naz Foundation's name.

Lawyers Collective was headed by a human-rights lawyer named Anand Grover. But Anand was not India's Harvey Milk. Like Anjali, he wasn't even gay. Nowadays, Anand worked upstairs in a narrow building that relied on a gated elevator with a human operator. His office reminded me of the
Being John Malkovich
film set: the walls leaned inwards and the dimensions felt impossible. Volumes of legal tomes lined up in glass cabinets. Receptionists worked hidden behind towering stacks of manila folders.

Anand seemed ageless and had the kind of face that made white hair look so terrific that you looked forward to turning grey. He wore a crisp white cotton shirt, thick-framed designer spectacles and coloured rubber wristbands for different charities over his expensive wristwatch. His heart was grassroots; the
rest of him was fabulously tailored. Although Anjali said she'd always been skeptical that their joint efforts to dismantle Section 377 would fail, Anand said he'd been sure of success.

‘I was always 100 per cent confident,' he told me. ‘There is a mountain to be climbed. You can see it; you
have
to climb it. It may take time. You may fall. But then you will go ahead, because it
will
be climbed. There's no doubt about it, because it's patent injustice.'

Anand had worked extensively in cases relating to homosexuality and HIV since the late 1980s, when he represented Dominic D'Souza, a gay man who was fired after being diagnosed as HIV-positive. Doctors refused to treat D'Souza and he was detained in a sanitarium for two months by state officials who insisted they were serving the public interest. D'Souza's mother approached Anand and his team to initiate a lawsuit to have Section 53 – the law that allowed D'Souza to be fired and detained – declared unconstitutional and a denial of due process. They lost the case and everyone was shattered. In 1992, as D'Souza was dying, Anand promised him that he'd keep on with the work they had started together.

After D'Souza died, Anand became obsessed. Gay men approached him for representation if they were being blackmailed. Anand would take on four new pro bono HIV-related cases per month. His wife – herself a lawyer and co-founder of Lawyers Collective – said he'd gone mad, and Anand knew she was only half-joking. After years of working on these cases, he felt the root cause of each one was the same: Section 377. If India got rid of that law, most of these cases would disappear. And, technically, it wasn't just gay men who infringed Section 377.

‘The act was only against gay men on the face of it,' he said.
‘But if I'm heterosexual and have anal sex or oral sex with my female partner, I'd go to jail too. You have to understand this section.' Anand looked at the ceiling and recited directly from Section 377. ‘“Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse with a man, woman or animal – against the order of nature – shall be punished.” What is the meaning of “against the order of nature”? A practice which does not beget children! Penis is the culprit –'

‘As it always is,' I said.

Anand laughed, agreeing.

‘As it always is. And the explanation says, “penetration that is sufficient to constitute this offence”. So penile penetration is a
must
.'

This provided an interesting loophole if you were a woman. Lesbians were completely ignored by Section 377. If you were a queer woman in India, this was one of those rare cases in which discrimination actually swung in your favour. When Anjali, Anand and Lawyers Collective started mobilising for the fight against Section 377, some lesbians in India became nervous. They remembered a 1995 case in Sri Lanka, in which petitioners lobbied against a similar colonial law called Article 365. Not only did the repeal fail, the campaign made things worse. The previous law, the government decided, wasn't discriminatory
enough
, so they created an amendment called Article 365A, which criminalised same-sex relationships between anyone – men
and
women – as an act of ‘gross indecency'. Female-on-female sex was now punishable by up to twelve years' imprisonment in Sri Lanka, solely because activists had spoken up. It was the court's perverse way of redefining equality.

Anand and Lawyers Collective, aware of these concerns, arranged open meetings and forums for anyone who felt they had a stake in the repeal. Queer people from gay to
hijra
,
transgender to bisexual, poor to middle class, arrived to debate the campaign. In the meantime, the case tediously bounced from the Delhi High Court to the Indian Supreme Court and back to the Delhi High Court. For most people, the wait would have been frustrating. But in the years it took for the case to pass between the courts, Anand noticed something else developing.

‘By 2006 and 2007, there were talk shows and chat shows. Everybody was saying, “My daughter is gay,” “My son is this,” “My brother is that, and I support them.”'

Journalists and commentators started talking about the petition too. The issue occupied increasing inches of column space in newspapers and divided the Indian parliament. The Health Ministry declared its support for repealing Section 377 for public health reasons, while the Home Ministry denounced the petition. Having two government ministries publicly contradict each other gave the repeal an advantage, forcing the court to push its final arguments through. Suddenly, it was announced that the two-judge bench overseeing the case would deliver a swift verdict.

Indians and expatriates sent emails and text messages to each other with the news:
They're deciding tomorrow.
Anand got the word in Geneva where he was working for the UN. In India, and around the world, people stayed up in anticipation.

The next morning, the Delhi High Court was packed with activists, lawyers, reporters and spectators. Judgements in other cases had to be read out first, but the crowd was there for
Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi.
As the two-man bench entered the room, everyone stood up, bowed to both Chief Justice A.P. Shah and Justice S. Muralidhar, and then sat down. A silence descended.

‘I will read out the conclusion,' Shah said. ‘We declare that
Section 377 IPC, insofar it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles –'

A gasp went around the room. Some people squealed. Anjali couldn't tell whether they were expressing horror or joy. She wished her legal vocabulary was stronger. Had they won or not?

‘What's he saying, what's he saying?' she asked the man next to her, a lawyer she didn't know. ‘What does it mean?' Smiling, he leaned over and explained.

In homes across India, the rolling ticker-tape display on the bottom of television sets explained the verdict in capital letters: ‘BREAKING NEWS: HOMOSEXUALITY IS LEGAL. HC: CONSENSUAL SEX BETWEEN SAME SEX ADULTS IS LEGAL.'

Later, Anjali would recall the moment over and over.

‘My god,' she said. ‘It was such
fun
.'

In Delhi,
hijras
led dances among repeal supporters who held up banners for photojournalists. In Mumbai, 1500 kilometres away, it was monsoon season and the city was being pissed on by rain. It didn't matter: people ran or caught rickshaws or taxis to each other's homes to see the news, remaining glued to the TV sets for hours. People skipped work. Many wept. Religious groups fumed. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's conservative opposition, had always been against the repeal. And while few things were capable of uniting India's diverse Muslim, Christian and Hindu groups, they were all united in denouncing this. Furious, Baba Ramdev declared he would immediately file a petition with the Supreme Court against the decision.

On that day, though, it was clear which side the news producers were on. As they reported the news of Ramdev's petition, every TV station managed to find the most bizarre footage of
Ramdev possible, including shots of him doing Russian Cossack leg thrusts and that weird thing he did with his gut. It made it hard to take him seriously.

Several days after the court verdict in Delhi, a still-buzzing but exhausted Anjali Gopalan was in bed when her phone rang. On the other line was a man's voice she didn't recognise, telling her that he represented Baba Ramdev and that his people were going to have her kidnapped and killed. Normally, this would have been chilling, but after the previous few days, Anjali was exhausted.

‘Look,' she said down the phone line. ‘I don't think you've seen me. It's not so easy to kidnap me.'

‘Women like you,' continued the caller, ‘have singlehandly ruined the moral fibre of this country.'

‘Well, thank you very much,' she said, sighing. ‘I'll take that as a compliment.'

Then she hung up.

The next day, she told her colleagues at the Naz Foundation what had happened. They were appalled.

‘You must file a police report and ask for protection,' they said.

‘Are you mad?' Anjali said. ‘Ridiculous!
This
is what you're going to get killed for? Fuck this shit.'

So far, nothing had happened. After a decade's worth of drama in campaigning for queer rights, Anjali had recently started as a volunteer at a Delhi shelter dedicated to caring for abandoned, neglected and abused animals. Considering the number of stray dogs, cats and cattle I'd seen on Delhi's streets, it sounded like a job without any end in sight. It was as though she was always looking out for the next disenfranchised group to take care of.

‘You can't help yourself, can you?' I said.

Anjali shrugged mock-innocently.

Maybe Baba Ramdev was right. It always started with homosexuals before progressing on to animals.

My hotel in Delhi – if you could call it a hotel – was a hole in the wall with the vaguely brothel-ish name of Hotel Express 66. It was bang in the heart of the city's busiest road, an artery for trade that connected Delhi to its main railway and metro station. Outside the hotel, stray dogs with long snouts and droopy nipples wove through human legs, as those human legs wove through a bitumen chaos of cattle-drawn carts, motor cycles and three-wheeled auto rickshaws. Teenage boys sat on the ledges of the main bridge of Desh Bandhu Gupta Road eating snacks, feet dangling over the edge, seemingly oblivious to the fatal drop. Men pissed into open-air urinals on the kerbside only to have their piss run back onto the footpath and road. Everything stank. It was an ever-evolving smell, usually consisting of petrol fumes, faeces, human urine and an exciting hint of fire. At night, even with the windows closed, the smell seeped inside. As I slept, I collected it in my lungs.

In the morning, barely conscious and heavy-lidded, I caught the metro into the suburbs to meet the man known as the godfather of India's modern gay movement, who'd supported the Section 377 repeal movement from the start. Ashok Row Kavi had even discussed with Lawyers Collective the possibility of filing the petition himself, but the problem was that he lived in Mumbai at the time.