Homopopulism: A new layer of LGBTQ politics in India

Abstract

This paper seeks to conceptualize homopopulism as a popular relationality in shifting contexts of inclusion/exclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) identified persons. A new layer of queer politics is visible in contemporary India. Hinged between older colonial discourses, current neoliberal systems, and promises by state actors to include LGBTQ concerns, sexuality is explicitly and implicitly mobilized to create, claim, and resist the present social. This consists of organizational left and liberal efforts to include and represent LGBTQ identified bodies in election promises, with effects that are titled heavily toward the middle to upper-middle class, able, caste-Hindu bodies. Alongside this, groups such as Queer Hindu Alliance are working to claim a stake in the Hindutva regime. Parallel to this, the bodies and voices of queer and trans* persons aim and struggle to connect with Muslim and Dalit individuals and groups around survival and citizenship. This paper attempts to comprehend these unique and tumultuous moments through the concept of homopopulism. I argue that homopopulism offers a useful reference point to understand how a complex democracy, consisting of right-wing, left-liberal, and centrist state practices, uses populist discourses and methods to gradually mobilize LGBTQ identities for thin centered ideologies without necessarily having to create a recognizable population group with affirmative action policies and anti-discriminatory guarantees, as facilitating conditions for a liveable life.

Keywords

Homopopulism queer politics LGBTQ rights India

Introduction

This paper argues for nuancing the theorization of mobilization of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) identities with homopopulism in contexts where queer politics cannot be understood in absolute inclusive/exclusive terms. Sexuality in general and queer in particular are value-laden political objects and projects. With the rise of the “queer/sexuality” question along with the “woman/gender” question (Menon, 2009; Rao, 2014), LGBTQ rights have become central to nation, nationality and citizenship formation in some places, thereby further hierarchizing countries that are “backward” and “forward.” From their incorporation in development agendas to recognition of its varying identities and expressions as figures of life, sexuality rights are a primary organizing concern for national states, international human rights organizations, and international financial institutions on a spatio-temporal scale (Browne and Banerjea et al., 2019; Puar, 2007; Rao, 2015, 2020; Shah, 2019). States in the global north, international human rights, financial and development organizations use sexuality rights and equality legislation as a meter to measure democratic progress and backwardness of nations as well as to determine and disburse development aid (Banerjea and Browne, 2018; Browne et al., 2015; Browne et al., 2019; Rao, 2015, 2020). At the same time, national states in the global south deploy LGBTQ rights to define and redefine themselves around questions of independence, cultural pasts, development, and future growth (Rao, 2020). Against this backdrop, the politicization and popularization of LGBTQ rights in India present a complex scenario demanding nuanced and sustained analytical attention. This paper deploys an academic-activist lens¹ to undertake this analysis.

A new layer of queer politics² is solidifying in India. Hinged between older colonial discourses,³ global neoliberal systems,⁴ and Hindu nationalism, sexuality in general and LGBTQ identities, in particular, are being explicitly and implicitly mobilized to create, claim, and resist the present social. This includes organizational left and liberal efforts to represent LGBTQ identified bodies in election promises, workplace, and media, with effects targeted toward middle to upper-middle class, able, caste-Hindu bodies. Alongside this, groups and individuals such as Queer Hindu Alliance⁵ and a trans rights activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi and others are working to claim a stake in the Hindutva regime (Bhattacharya, 2019). Parallel to this, trans* and queer bodies and voices aim and struggle to connect with Muslim and Dalit individuals and groups around survival and citizenship. This paper attempts to comprehend a select aspect of these moments through the concept of homopopulism. At present, homonationalism and homohindunationalism are commonly used in academic and activist discourses to understand the relation of queer and trans* politics to statist discourses.⁶ This paper is not attempting to fill an analytical gap in the literature on homonationalism and homohindunationalism. Instead, I seek to ally with these two terms to understand a new layer of national level queer politics articulated by political parties to include LGBTQ voices. This layer has a specific texture that, while connected to, also exceeds the homonationalist/homohindunationalist conceptual duo. Homopopulism offers a reference point to discuss this new layer, that is, to comprehend how a complex democracy, consisting of right-wing, left-liberal, and centrist state practices, harbors populist discourses and methods to gradually mobilize LGBTQ identities for thin centered ideologies, without necessarily having to create a recognizable population group with affirmative action policies and anti-discriminatory guarantees, as facilitating conditions for a liveable life. This paper also draws attention to some examples of regional-national⁷ counter voices that work with/in homopopulist states to redraw rights agendas and claim space within. In this sense, homopopulism can also be understood as a popular modality to relate to the political in shifting contexts of inclusion/exclusion of LGBTQ identities. By saying this, I am not classifying the regional-national voices with the same populist tonality of the national political parties but drawing attention to a particular engagement with statist discourses that cannot be easily characterized as either homonationalist or homohindunationalist. Thus, I use homopopulism to include a diverse set of political relationalities that, while primarily having state-centered inclusion of the sexual subject at the center, is not limited by it and can consist of voices otherwise marginalized by the statist political logic. Homopopulism can have a wide range of relational modalities that involve state actors and those engaging with the state. This article does not provide comprehensive examples to highlight this from various angles. It gives a starting discussion to consider the popular and populist aspects of queer politics, which may not always fit into the homonationalism/homohindunationalism conceptual frameworks.

In the next part of this discussion, I delineate the contextual-theoretical imperative for homopopulism. Following that, I read the 2019 Indian general election manifestos of three major political parties, the CPI(M),⁸ the Congress, and the BJP,⁹ to delineate an instance of homopopulism within the national level political discourse. The paper ends with select examples of regional-national voices that exist with/in homopopulism, which I seek in places that are not solely about LGBTQ claims to identity and rights but generate urgent critiques to statist discourses as queer and trans* subjects.

The contextual-theoretical imperatives of homopopulism

The importance of homopopulism as an analytical category is connected to unique conditions within postcolonial nation states, wherein a unilinear connection of rights based claims to state sovereignty may not work. Academic works have highlighted the homonationalist and homohindunationalist aspects of queer and trans* organizing in India, especially concerning global neoliberal systems and right-wing politics (Sircar and Jain, 2012; Sircar, 2020; Upadhyay, 2018, 2020). These extant concepts, while significant and relevant, at times are unable to account for those spaces that are neither about straightforward inclusion for the establishment of state and Hindu fundamentalist sovereignty nor about upholding critical rights based claims to a liveable life. Homopopulism, as an allied category, needs to be foregrounded with homonationalism and homohindunationalism to understand the popular nuances of mobilization of LGBTQ identities in India.

Homonationalism (Puar, 2007) is a crucial lens to understand how queer subjects, once figures of death and disease, are folded into and align with nationalist projects and agendas as figures of life and productivity. Jasbir Puar’s now widely circulated concept was initially developed to understand how queer is complicit with an imperial nation state and then, later on, to see how the US nation state use acceptance and tolerance of LGBTQ rights as a meter to test and assess degrees of national sovereignty (Puar, 2007, 2013b). Since then, the term has traveled to explain the various linkages between activism for LGBTQ civil rights, the emergence of the global queer subject, pinkwashing, and imperial politics (Schotten, 2016). Broadly, homonationalism functions as a “political keyword” and “offers necessary tools for rearticulating a democratic and inclusive queer politics” with a simultaneous articulation of a war on terror (Nyong’o, 2018: xiv).¹⁰ Within the Indian context, the term is commonly used to mark the representation of LGBTQ visibility and rights through nationalist symbols in pride marches (Sircar, 2017), the intensified attachments of the queer body to nationalist projects (Banerjea and Dasgupta, 2013), and the protection of minority rights, including LGBTQ rights, as one of many justifications behind the revocation of Article 370¹¹ in Kashmir (Alam, 2019; Das and Bund, 2020; Gawande, 2019). Broadly, this term has served to illuminate the liberal, upper caste, middle and upper-class underpinning of mobilization of LGBTQ identities in the urban Indian context, including its recent implications for establishing sovereignty. In recent years, a related term, homohindunationalism, has been circulating to highlight casteist and Islamophobic articulations of queer voices in general and statist discourses in particular. Upadhyay (2018, 2020) deploys homohindunationalism to specifically refer to a set of transnational Brahmanical¹² and Islamophobic Hindutva voices that propagate the liberation of a purported gender non-conforming friendly Hinduism from colonial homophobia. Liberation here also means a return from exile, that is, the once “exiled queers” in keeping with the “ghar wapsi”¹³ agenda, now needs to be part of the Hindu fold, of course, after being de-homo-ed through conversion therapy (Bachhetta, 2020; Updhyaya, 2020). Thus, both homonationalism and homohindunationalism have served to provide a critical interrogation of the contemporary Brahmanical, right-wing, and neoliberal leanings of queer and trans* inclusive agendas. And yet, there are ambivalent moments that exceed such inclusions.

LGBTQ is not a developmental category in the Indian polity and policy framework, unlike in the United States, UK, particular EU member states, and Israel. Neither does LGBTQ exist as a “favoured minority” (Sircar 2017: 1). The Indian governmental bodies have not mobilized LGBTQ populations at a scale like the US, UK, EU nation states, or Israel to resolve and or legitimize national or international policy and development matters. Yet, in recent years, bodies are being interpellated as “transgender” and as “LGBTQ” in statist discourses. Mohan Bhagwat, the Sarsanghchalak (Executive Chief) of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh),¹⁴ after the Navtej judgment¹⁵ has said that if the “problem” (of homosexuality) cannot be solved, then they should be accepted and anyone who suffers from this “disease” should be allowed to lead a fulfilling life (India Today, 2018). These and similar homonegative statements¹⁶ exist alongside transphobic comments that legitimate the presence of transgender persons via connection to an ancient Hindu past.¹⁷ This reclamation of a Brahmanical past can be understood through what Paola Bacchetta (2013) calls “queerphilia,” that is, when Hindu religious symbolism is drawn upon to present a hyper-valorized queer. Queerphilia finds resonance in self-proclaimed supporters and allies of the state, such as the Queer Hindu Alliance. They attempt to represent queer genders and sexualities as authentic subjects of the Indian nation by excavating them from Hindu epics and religious texts. In the same breath, such voices isolate themselves from left-liberal queers, citing them as either anti-national or anti-Hindu. In parallel and interconnected ways, select sectors of the corporate world and media are opening up to issues of benefits and representation that offer legitimate ways of re-imagining middle to upper-middle class¹⁸ queer bodies within the expanding Hindutva regime.

Homonationalism and homohindunationalism are valuable concepts to interrogate the Brahmanical and Islamophobic connections between Hindu right-wing politics, neoliberalizing economies, and LGBTQ politics in India. Nevertheless, I argue they encounter some limitations as a standalone explanatory framework. While helpful to articulate queer complicity with global Islamophobic and Brahmanical and neoliberalizing statist practices, homonationalism, and homohindunationalism fall short of analytical productivity concerning a postcolonial Indian context for the following three reasons. First, there is a complication in primarily marking queer politics in India through the homonationalist/homohindunationalist frame. There are various community-based critiques, “micro narratives of unbelonging” (Bhattacharya, 2019), and different imaginations of belonging that get sidelined in this primary explanatory frame. All juridico-political engagements of queers cannot be “reified into a simple demand for state recognition” (Shahani 2017: 196). Many micro narratives are about the right to non-discrimination, freedom from institutional violence and legal reform, and reservations in educational institutions and employment sectors. As Dhawan (2016) argues, legal reforms in countries such as India “are a result of complex social and legal struggles that produce ambivalent and diverse effects” that cannot be equated with homonationalism without looking into regional histories of reforms (64). A heightened focus on the homonationalist/homohindunationalist frame may tend to push out of academic focus the efforts and issues of gender and sexual minorities, especially those who are economically marginalized, Dalit Bahujan and Adivasi, who have to regularly engage with state actors to create non-discriminatory conditions for a liveable life. While the requirements for non-discrimination are not necessarily dependent on the quantity of juridico-political reforms, legal and legislative support is crucial to counter collective forms of violence from and inaccessibility to public and private institutions, which sometimes involves complex negotiations with state actors. Second, there are situations where queer activist practices and experiential narratives do not necessarily follow a clear instrumentalization/scapegoating¹⁹ route, nor a seamless linear developmental history “which begins with a closeted, ‘prepolitical’ same-sex act that culminates in a liberated, politicized, modern, gay subjectivity” (Dhawan, 2016: 54). Linear narratives informing struggles around juridico-political recognition for the homosexual have existed hand in hand with different idioms of sexuality, which, experientially, are often non-linear, open-ended, and thereby “double” (Katyal, 2016). Thus, complex critiques of gendered and casteist geographies of sexual and sexualized others are tied into grassroots activist practices and individual narratives. Third, the homonationalism/homohindunationalism dual lens cannot explain why LGBTQ identities are being mobilized for specific political projects and yet remain without a livelihood, affirmative action, and anti-discrimination guarantees, all of which are facilitating conditions for a liveable life.

When historically excluded queer and trans* communities place demands on a homonationalist and homohindunationalist state for social and economic guarantees of life, livelihood, and redressal of violence, how does one frame a nuanced conceptualization? How does one read a nation states’ projection for inclusion in response to the rights claims of violated queer and trans* communities? It is imperative to distinguish between the claim to rights for redressal of violence by queer and trans* communities, mobilization of such claims by states to further their exclusionary political projects, and agendas of queer and trans* communities with cultural and social capital for uninterrogated assimilation. The template of a juridico-political conversation in a postcolonial nation state cannot have a unilinear reading of alignment with the government. In a context such as India, one has to ask how queer and trans* engagements with the homonationalist/homohindunationalist state either disrupt or push postcolonial hierarchies of power to perform for the marginalized and historically oppressed communities. Because of these conditions outlined above, LGBTQ identified bodies in the hierarchically divided social occupy varied positions between life and death in continuity and juxtaposition with pre-colonial, colonial, and liberal rights based discourses. The linkages between the multiple positionalities of the Indian state, casteist, gendered, and sexualized geographies, and different activist practices complicate an understanding of queer politics around only homonationalism and homohindunationalism. Homopopulism, at this juncture, with homonationalism and homohindunationalism, can offer a nuanced and dynamic way to understand the varied layers of the relationship between sexuality rights claims and state responses, including but not limited to claims with/in state sovereignty. In the next section, I selectively engage with one layer of this scenario. I particularly focus on state responses in election manifestos as an example of a unique manifestation of homopopulism. When sexual subjects are interpellated for the advancement of thin centered ideologies, without having to fulfill key enabling social and economic obligations that are crucial to live a socially and economically secure life, I understand this condition as populist.

Conceptually, I am drawing from the work of Mudde and Kaltwasser to understand populism as a “thin-centered ideology,” and therefore malleable (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017a). Mudde and Kaltwasser suggest that because populism is “thin,” it articulates itself with other ideologies such as liberalism and nationalism to promote specific political agendas and projects. In its basic premise, to create a moral ground, populism in contemporary history works by creating an opposition between the “pure people and corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2017: location 905). The “people” in populism is understood as sovereign; simultaneously, it functions as an “empty signifier” (Laclau, 1977) because it can appeal to different social groups.²⁰ Populism, however, is not globally uniform and takes up multiple manifestations in national contexts. Populism is a common feature of Indian’s democracy. A comprehensive history of the specificities of Indian populism is outside the scope of this paper. Briefly, at various points in India’s postcolonial history, different groups have been mobilized or come in conflict with the state to demand social, economic, and political guarantees and rights to have equal opportunity in public institutions and access to infrastructure. The state assesses many of them like a combatant, evaluating them on the threat they pose and less on their merits (Rajagopal, 2016).²¹ Various political parties with both national and regional influence, such as the Janta coalition, Congress, the CPI(M), the DMK,²² and AIDMK,²³ have mobilized middle caste groups, linguistic communities, and economically marginalized people (Subramanian, 2007) to further specific agendas, claiming to represent “the will of the people.” The public sphere in India has thus held varieties of populism, “where interest and identity serve to mobilize people in combinations that are hard to anticipate” (Rajagopal, 2016: 124). A running thread in the post-independence period has been that political strategies and tools of mobilization by the Indian state have explicitly or implicitly defined themselves through a sense of belonging to Hinduism (mobilized through the idea of original India) or the peasantry (mobilized through the notion of the peasantry) (Jaffrelot and Tillin, 2017: 4793–4795).²⁴ More recently, with the consolidation of the right-wing state, a specific kind of populism that relies on the politics of fear is taking root. Chatterji et al. (2019), drawing from Gino Germani, identify this is as “national populism.” A politics of fear that relies on a singular anti-minority politics has taken shape through certain hegemonic oppositions, such as between “sons of the soil” and foreigners (migrants, threatening neighbors), established middle-classes, and marginalized groups, that is, Dalits and OBCs²⁵ (Mahaprashasta, 2020). The right-wing state pits “the people,” that is, the economically marginalized, the urbanizing middle-classes and the Hindu majority as part of one group whose interests must be defended, against the “anti-national” and “liberal elite,” who are seen to “monopolise power, resources and prevent ‘development’ while pandering to non-Hindu minority groups” (Chacko, 2018: 543).²⁶ This politics of fear often remains unquestioned by aspirants (across class) who are assured of a future place in the “neo middle-class”.²⁷ The concept of homopopulism can offer incisive insights, with homonationalism/homohindunationalism, into the popular logic of mobilization of LGBTQ bodies that are used to further interconnected projects and discourses of national-cultural consolidation in global imaginings of forward/backward politics. I use homopopulism to highlight a socio-political condition, that while informed by Hindu nationalism, is not limited by it. I am not making any grand empirical claims nor attempting to undertake a historical survey of populist forms of political participation in India. I merely want to suggest what I take to be some new moments of queer inclusion as a populist move and its predicament of living with realities that desire social and economic guarantees, but on their terms.

I have come across one academic usage of the term homopopulism to explain how queer logic underpins the rise of populist nationalism across Europe and North America. Lotter and Fourie (2020) deploy homopopulism to understand how emergent right-wing national populist states in Europe and North America in collusion with queer subjects are othering ethnic and religious minorities. For the authors, the urgency to understand “fear based patriotism” and its connection to the rejection of queer asylum seekers from South Africa necessitates a shift from homonationalism to homopopulism. The authors historically position this trend in a post-Orlando/ISIS nationalist context. They argue for homopopulism’s conceptual need to explain a global political order that, while defined by it, is moving away from a post-9/11 neoliberal hegemony to a “fearful sovereignty” based on right-wing populism. Focusing on LGBTQ asylum seeking in the global human rights policy and discourse, Lotter and Fourie (2020) demonstrate how LGBTQ subjects are “rejecting queer asylum seekers from Africa by supporting and/or endorsing (colluding with) populist-nationalist (right-wing) entities and rhetoric in the EU and its member states” (2). Placing the politics of fear as central to right-wing national populist states, the authors underscore that a “fearful, patriotic, queer sovereign subject” is today at the center of hegemonic queer politics rather than a liberal rights-bearing subject (Lotter and Fourie, 2020: 12). Homopopulism helps explain the growing dispensation toward “political intolerance” of “racial (black, brown), gendered (women, non-binary), sexual (homosexual, queers), classist (poor), national (immigrants, rapists), and Other figurations (terrorist, unmeltable, disloyal citizens)” (Lotter and Fourie, 2020: 12). I see my conceptualization of homopopulism as juxtaposed to the European and North American context; the running thread in both is a particular kind of state response that deploys a register of representation, rights, and forwardness.

The homopopulist responses in election manifestos

There is a complex dynamic between LGBTQ claims for recognition and rights and state responses. Collective efforts to gain redressal from violence, guarantees of livelihood, inclusion in public and private institutions, and negotiating with hardliner states need to be distinguished from assimilative agendas. Such efforts and claims in the Indian context result from long histories of struggles of queer and trans* Dalit Bahujan Adivasi individuals and collectives; some never surface, remaining stifled within deeply gendered and violent households. These have drawn attention to the need for placing queer and trans* issues on the political party and policy-map that do not begin and end with an uninterrogated need for state recognition and assimilation. How are such claims being noted by state actors? In this section, I take the example of election manifestos by three major political parties released before the 2019 Indian general election, which explicitly carry promises and policy goals for LGBTQ identifying persons. Would it be enough to call these observances attempts at homonationalist and homohindunationalist assimilation, especially when activist collectives and individuals are navigating homonegative and transphobic states to make them accountable to populations dispossessed and violated? Or is it also imperative to do a critical reading of such promises—as part of making states accountable—to see what is problematic and unacceptable and what needs amendment? A homopopulist lens allows a critical reading of political party and policy promises to make state actors accountable to marginalized queer and trans* persons and collectives, alongside calling out homonationalist and homohindunationalist agendas. The homonationalist/homohindunationalist conceptual duo may not spot populist modes of incorporation and populist theories of the state fall short in addressing dynamic modes of LGBTQ incorporation. Homopopulism connects the two, thereby facilitating a nuanced engagement with the process of incorporation, alongside the homonationalist/homohindunationalist frame. The following three election manifestos are part of more extensive histories of the CPI(M), Congress, and BJP in India’s postcolonial trajectories. The populist circuits of each of these parties are beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I read these manifestos as a response of state actors who, aligned to thin centered ideologies of national development, use idioms such as empowerment and social justice as a legitimizing move to represent the will of LGBTQ identifying persons in a global terrain of forward/backward states, without having to actually fulfill social and economic obligations.

Political party election manifesto: CPI(M)

Under a heading For Equal Rights and Social Justice, the following exists (along with subheadings with “Women,” “Children,” “Youth,” “Scheduled Castes,” “Scheduled Tribes,” “Minorities,” “OBCs” and “Persons with Disabilities”):

Transgender

• Passing the Rights of Transgender Persons Bill, 2014 to uphold the rights of all transgender persons and removing the lacunae present in the current Transgender Persons Bill, 2018.

• Legal recognition and protection to same-sex couples similar to marriage—“civil union”/“same-sex-partnerships,” legislation/s on similar lines as Special Marriage Act, 1954 so that the partner can be listed as a dependent, for inheritance, alimony in case of divorce etc.

• A comprehensive anti-discriminatory bill covering LGBT.

• Reservation in education institutions; ensuring horizontal reservation in employment.

• Ensuring crimes against LGBT persons are treated on par with crimes against non-LGBT persons.

• Measures to address bullying, violence and harassment of gender non-conforming and LGBT students, staff and teachers in educational spaces; enforcement of UGC²⁸ anti-ragging policy amendment (2016) that addresses ragging based on sexual orientation and gender identity, ensuring accessible and safe bathrooms for trans, intersex and gender non-conforming students, staff and faculty.

(https://cpim.org/pressbriefs/cpim-election-manifesto-17th-lok-sabha)

Political party election manifesto: Congress

Under a section Swabhimaan: Self Esteem for the Deprived the following exists (along with subheadings with “Women’s empowerment and gender justice,” “SC, ST and OBC,” “Jammu and Kashmir,” “North Eastern States,” “Religious and Linguistic Minorities,” “Denotified Tribes,” “Senior Citizens,” and “Persons with Disabilities”):

Rights of LGBTQIA+

• Congress promises to ensure the effective implementation of the judgment in the Navtej Singh Johar case. We will protect the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community.

• We will immediately withdraw the Transgender Bill, 2018, pending in Parliament. Instead, Congress will introduce a Bill that will be consistent with the judgment in the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) case. The new Bill will be drafted in consultation with the LGBTQIA+ community.

• We will direct that gender sensitivity training, especially for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community, be made mandatory in all government departments and organizations including the Armed Forces and the Police Forces.

(https://manifesto.inc.in/en/rights_of_lgbtqia.html)

Political party election manifesto: BJP

Under a section on Inclusive Development, the following is stated: The creation of an open and egalitarian society is central to the philosophy of the BJP. “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas”²⁹ is at the heart of PM Modi’s vision of New India. In a sub heading, the following exists:

Empowering transgenders

• We are committed to bring transgenders to the mainstream through adequate socio-economic and policy initiatives.

• We will ensure self-employment and skill development avenues for transgender youth.

(https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5798075-Bjp-Election-2019-Manifesto-English.html)

These manifestos, publicized during the 2019 national election, refer either implicitly or explicitly to inclusion in reference to vital legal flashpoints in India’s recent history. These are as follows:

(1) The NALSA v. Union of India case, 14 April 2014, upheld the right of Indians to self-identify their gender, irrespective of gender-affirmation surgery.³⁰ This verdict has been crafted to cater to primarily hijras³¹ and, to a certain extent, transwomen (Bhattacharya, 2019).

(2) On September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India, in the Navtej Johar and Others. v Union of India case read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the anti-sodomy colonial law, in effect recognizing consensual sexual acts other than peno-vaginal ones.

(3) The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2019, which is supposed to safeguard the “welfare” of transgender persons in India.³²

All three manifestos, with references to legal milestones, albeit with some differences, use identification terminologies that do not distinguish between and between different sections of queer and trans* communities. The manifestos interpellate a certain kind of liberal sexual subject, promising social reforms without little or no discussion as to how or under what conditions enabling social and economic conditions can be created for marginalized queer and trans* persons. This is a typical populist move, the interpellation of sexual subjects to advance a thin centered ideology of “forward looking” national development. These promises do not find discussion space for a comprehensive anti-discrimination policy and horizontal reservations in public institutions. Grace Banu, founder and director of the Trans Rights Now, a Dalit Bahujan Adivasi focused collective, is pushing for horizontal reservations in employment and educational institutions against the central government’s move to include trans persons in the OBCs. As the press release and public statement explain

We believe that including all transgender persons under the OBC category will not recognise the caste status of transgender and intersex persons… With vertical reservation, transgender and intersex persons already belonging to the OBC category will not gain anything, even though they face further discrimination on the grounds of gender identity compared to other OBC candidates. We further believe that a scheme providing vertical reservation to transgender persons is harmful because within the OBC category, the chances of a transgender person getting a post or seat is very slim as they will be competing with other members of the OBC category.

Therefore, we appeal to the Union government that reservations for transgender persons should be provided as ‘horizontal reservation” -- as a separate category within already existing classes like SC, ST, OBC, like the reservation provided for women and persons with disabilities. Horizontal reservations are interlocking and cut across vertical reservations, and take into account the distinctions that may exist within one community or group based on different caste status.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RD1_8sD9h9X-SQJfgTksVzLA0Ue4CM4K7M-6cv8cGFU/edit

Further, the manifestos use the familiar language of rights and national-developmental idioms, such as “empowerment,” “reservation,” “swabhimaan” (self-esteem), to demonstrate support for LGBTQ concerns. Such national-developmental expressions are not new in Indian political party life, deployed popularly to cater to marginalized sections for their votes, because of which the Indian polity is marked by constant claims and counterclaims to find a place within state policy and welfare reforms.

Each of the promises in the manifestos is a populist move. They promise to represent concerns of gender-sexual minorities without either consultation or substantial follow up, putting the lives of oppressed and marginalized queer and trans* persons at additional risk. For example, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2019, which became an Act in December 2019, is not life affirming but instead paves the way for “killing” transpersons, as transpersons and transgender activists have stated (Dharmadhikari and Gopinath, 2018; Grace Banu, 2016). The Act, in effect, has taken away a critical right of self-identification and insists that transgender identification will require a transgender certificate that will have to be obtained by elaborate medico-legal procedures.³³ Additionally, it does not make concrete provisions for healthcare, employment, and educational opportunities. Further, the Act does not provide equal protection for sexual abuse and offenses because the maximum penalty for abusers and offenders is 2 years’ imprisonment. For similar violations committed against cis women under the Indian Penal Code, 1860, the penalty ranges from 3 years to life imprisonment. This violates Article 14 of the Constitution of India, 1950, which provides for equality before the law and equal protection of laws. I read the promises in the manifestos as a “thin hearing” of sexuality rights concerns rather than a commitment to juridico-political reconfigurations. The most marginalized within the LGBT category are thus left without facilitating conditions for a liveable life.

What then is primarily achieved by a populist reference to LGBTQ concerns in election manifestos? My reading of the manifestos reveals a common running thread. In all, there is an attempt to present the oppressed and marginalized within a familiar language and image of rights for purposes other than their obvious democratic moorings. Rights are a focal point around which social actors and institutions define simultaneities with liberal democracies in the global north and difference with other nations in the global south, recently more so around sexuality. This is a specific kind of political relationality that is popular precisely because it draws upon a familiar temporal trope of “having arrived” and “not yet arrived,” a key way in which “third world difference” is lived and understood around the presence or lack of LGBTQ rights. That India has now joined the “list of countries where homosexuality is not a crime” was a popular media headline and sentiment that many of us encountered on and right after September 6, 2018. (NDTV 6 September 2018). India’s name appeared in this list along with several northern countries. We were reminded that Nigeria, Ghana, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Qatar, and Pakistan still criminalize homosexuality. The English language media gave us a short tour of “Gay Rights Around The Globe” and “How The World Reacts To Homosexuality” (NDTV 6 September 2019), and we were told that we had now won on the global stage (Livemint 10 September 2018). Along the way, such facts were buttressed by quoting data from the “World Values Survey” database, “a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life” (http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp). Thus, the inclusion of the LGBTQ body caters to a normative middle-class respectable Hindu imagination and is at risk of co-opting the struggles of gender-sexual minorities to further agendas of forward/backward discourses. Hence, it is necessary to mark and name the populist moments of LGBTQ inclusive agendas and highlight the need to engage with statist discourses to create conditions for socially and economically secure lives.

Let me further elaborate on the BJP’s ambivalent stand, as it is the ruling political party since 2014 that queer and trans* groups primarily encounter and presents an interesting shift that cannot only be explained by the neat folding of the LGBTQ subject in state agendas.³⁴ In the 1990s, the BJP foregrounded queerphobia with xenophobia. In discussing the significance of queer genders and sexualities to postcolonial right-wing Hindu nationalism, Paola Bacchetta argues that within discourses of Hindu nationalism, queerphobia does not necessarily present itself in isolation but reworks colonial sexual and gender normativities and presents itself with xenophobia. This occurs in two ways. “Xenophobic queerphobia” operates by “constructing the self-identified Indian queer as originating outside the nation,” and “queerphobic xenophobia” works by assigning queer genders and sexualities “to all the designated Others of the nation regardless of their sexual conduct or identity” (Bacchetta 2013: 123).³⁵ This violent foregrounding has not disappeared but instead re-represented itself with dominant caste politics, which aligns with groups such as the Queer Hindu Alliance and individuals such as Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. Further, the BJP’s stand toward “non-normative” sexual identities, expressions, and ways of living as a concern for elites and an import from “there,” that is, the West has circulated throughout the 2000s. And yet it did not contest nor advocate for S 377 when it was in court³⁶ (Bhattacharya 2019; Shah 2014), and now champions for economic inclusiveness for “transgenders.” Some queer persons and queer activists have welcomed this shifting position publicly aligning with the Hindu right (Bhattacharya 2019),³⁷ thus, directly pointing to the alliance between the middle to upper caste queer and trans subject with the state. At the same time, the shift in position has been produced within a context of heterogeneous collective critiques that, while asking for recognition, have also pushed the state to ask for anti-discriminatory rights and resources. These heterogenous collectives are not necessarily acting outside but have been in conversation with the hardliner state through critique or negotiations. Their interests are most often contextual and not necessarily in agreement with each other. Groups and collectives such as the Women March for Change, Dalit Queer Project, The Queer Muslim Project, and The Chinky Homo Project, all of which I refer to in the next section as voices with/in homopopulism, are select examples of these heterogeneous collectives. Others strictly work as funded NGOs and have a strategic and layered relationship with asking for anti-discrimination for LGBTQ identifying persons and mobilizing for broader social justice against increasing violence and marginalization as queer and trans* persons. This shifting position can be read as part of a larger homopopulist ethno-nationalism of Hindutva that claims to represent the people (read as neo middle class and aspirants) against a common enemy in a larger arena of forward/backward global politics. Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot argue that national populism is a consequence of the claim that the people are both victims and true inhabitants of the land (2019: 4). Majoritarian national populism functions by centralizing political authority, ruling by charismatic leaders, and circumventing civil liberties—all of which are part of the larger political culture of the Indian polity (Chatterji et al., 2019). Hence, violent casteist and jingoistic narratives that are integral to the continuity of the Indian state sits quite comfortably with queerphobic-xenophobic practices and has not led to an opening up of government bureaucracies to affirmative policies or even a minimal discussion about violence and discrimination against the most marginalized within queer and trans* persons.

It is clear that the ideal Indian queer subject understood as cis and trans* caste-Hindu, middle to upper-class, and urban is not waiting to be rescued by the global north but is the one who has been able to enter majoritarian popular global politics. It is also perfectly postured to join the prized global league of nations that accord legal recognition to its queers. While tracing a clear historical trajectory of the hegemonic queer subject is beyond the scope of this discussion, it needs to be emphasized that their production emerged in conjunction with political economic transformations post economic liberalization in the 1990s. Until the 1980s, the political economic scenario included a careful alliance and power sharing between the capitalist class, the bureaucratic elite, and the wealthy agrarian classes. Following economic liberalization, among other things, the entry of “foreign capital” into India’s economy accompanied by the opening up of telecommunications and information industries since the 1990s has meant that the capitalist class has more entrants with a possibility for social and economic mobility (Chatterjee, 2008). Opportunities for upward socio-economic mobility for LGBTQ identifying persons are promised through popular terms of respectable citizenship. Those who have secured the first step of legal recognition are now postured to gain a secure place amongst the globalizing middle-classes. So, on the one hand, at the global stage, the white queer body is used to put in place socio-economic imperialisms with civilizational progress/backward narratives; on the other, at a national level, hegemonic social groups with class and caste based privileges dominate gender-sexual politics through popular conservative as well as liberal scripts. Both these scripts are obvious, alerting their adherents and observers to the reality that sexuality’s role in producing and reproducing popular politics is here to stay. The seemingly intimate in India’s present, however uneasily, is now lodged within a continuing struggle for a life without violence, consolation of Hindu nationalism and multiple (and often conflicting) aspirations to be included within both national and global vision of progress.

But it is limiting to use this ideal-typical subject to understand the many facets of India’s queer and trans* movements. In India’s ethno-national populism (Chatterji et al., 2019), this subject is a numerical minority that co-authorizes a populist majoritarian right-wing as well as a left-liberal politics and cannot constitute a meta narrative about LGBTQ politics in India, as they do not necessarily serve anti-discriminatory queer and trans* interests and politics. To avoid a meta narrative of queer politics in India, I argue for using the lens of homopopulism, with homonationalism and homohindunationalism to isolate the connections between the queer subject within national populisms in general and ethno-nationalisms in particular.

Queer politics with/in homopopulism

Homopopulism offers an analytic move with homonationalist/homohindunationalist frames to understand LGBTQ inclusions/exclusions in postcolonial contexts. As delineated earlier, the contextual-theoretical imperative of homopopulism arises from a need to explain a dynamic and contradictory context such as India, where the homonationalism/homohindunationalism duo need to be bolstered to offer a nuanced analysis of the need for inclusions beyond assimilative agendas. Oppressed and marginalized queer and trans* individuals, collectives, and organizations are struggling to create facilitating conditions for social and economic guarantees for themselves and others. Several of these mobilize local political party leaders to seek short term help for rations and livelihood and move courts to make states accountable to deliver their promises for oppressed groups. Such engagements often happen with hardliner states to assert to become figures of life on their terms. In this last section, I briefly present a few critical regional-national voices and projects that work with/in the matrices of homopopulism.³⁸ These voices can be read as examples of queer and trans* politics to push through and reconfigure power hierarchies.

Women March for change

The Women March for Change was a national march that occurred right before the 2019 elections on the April 4, 2019, across various cities in India against a stated politics of violence and hate (Griffin 2019; Lalwani 2019) and to claim “constitutional rights as citizens of a democratic republic” (https://www.facebook.com/events/1127197854129659/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22search_results%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22search%22%7D]%2C%22ref_notif_type%22%3Anull%7D). Images 1 and 2 are stills from posters that were designed and carried by my fellow co-travelers and friends in Mumbai and Kolkata on that day. Image 1 reads, “smash the cis heteronormative Brahamanical capitalist patriarchies,” and Image 3, when translated, reads, “women and transpersons are saying down with fascism” and “women are on the streets calling to change the day through this vote.” This march was organized by several collectives, organizations, and unions comprising cis women, transpersons, farmers, students, lawyers, activists, and artists. While not without conflict and critique around who has the right to represent whom in which places of the country and when, the march included queer and trans* persons who populated the streets to bring attention to the continuing violence against Muslims, Dalits, and Christians, through the discourse of citizenship, law, and constitutional rights.

Dalit queer project

The Dalit Queer Project, officially launched in 2019, breaks “hetero norms and caste shackles one post at a time” (https://www.instagram.com/dalitqueerproject/?hl=en). As Aroh Akunth, a founding member of the project, states:

“In our experience we have yet to come across an organisation which is exclusively run by and for Dalit-queer folks. That is both a strength as well as a challenge for our project. As Dalit-queer people, our experiences of both identities vary greatly depending on ability, class, religion, and ethnicity.” (Hindustan Times, October 24, 2019).

As a collaborative space for Dalit and queer persons, the project centers caste into an understanding of sexualities and queer and trans* politics. Building archives of community knowledge in the form of art, podcasts, poetry, papers, the Dalit Queer project is a contemporary anti-caste and queer and trans* movement right within the heart of the Hindu nation state.

The queer Muslim project

The Queer Muslim Project is a “digital advocacy platform focused on creating visibility and awareness of LGBTQ+ Muslim issues in India and South Asia.” (https://www.facebook.com/thequeermuslimproject) Seeking to counter queerphobia and hatred against Muslims, “one story at a time,” the founder member Rafiul Alom Rahman explains that

The idea is to engage conversation on sexual and bodily rights, using feminist and progressive analysis of faith and scriptures. We are also nurturing leaders who know their basic rights. We help them with resources to learn and educate themselves who then go on spreading the knowledge to others, like a peer-based system” (Goled, 2019).

Emerging in 2017, The Queer Muslim Project continues to visibilize the lived realities of Muslim and queer and trans* persons. Modes of visibilization include online advocacy videos and offline gatherings to counter homogenous understandings of what it means to be a Muslim and a queer and trans person (Afrin, 2018).

The chinky homo project

The Chinky Homo Project is a digital and print queer anthology of North-East India (https://thechinkyhomoproject.wordpress.com). Kumam Davidson, an educator, activist, and curator, along with Pavel Sagolsem, started the project to “explore, document and archive narratives of queer people of the northeast” (Aleya, 2019). In several interviews, Davidson suggests that the racial, ethnic, and homonegative slurs “chinky” and “homo” are not used to reclaim them but to remind us of the peripheral and conflict ridden geographies that craft the lives of queer and trans* people from North-East India. As Davidson explains

The geo-political reality of the region; within and its relation to the country is a complex conundrum of human rights violation, struggles for self determination, inter-community, communal and inter-ethnic conflicts, drug epidemic, poverty, etc. Being a border region and the fact that it lies in a region whereby the nation’s relationship with the neighbouring country is a strained one definitely adds on to the State’s conviction to deploy overwhelming presence of military unit in the region…The conflict among and against the state takes such a centre stage that the most popular rhetoric of dignity and integrity of the region lies in preserving and maintaining the ethnic roots and tradition in the region. As such, any divergent lifestyle is seen with animosity as a factor that might loosen or pose a risk to the ethnic pride, dignity and integrity. These constrict the possibility of the queer to initiate and advocate their lifestyle and their sense of vision and progress (Nair, 2019).

Cities such as Delhi do not provide any respite to queer and trans* persons from the North-East, as the search for anonymity is often met with the racialization of queer and trans* bodies. Hence the project aims to increase visibilization and coverage of queer and trans* voices with diverse forms of “self-determination, assertion and representation” on their terms (Nair, 2019).

Through each of these above registers, I draw attention to queer and trans* political participation that is not singly about LGBTQ claims and rights but about generating urgent critiques to Brahmanical and Islamophobic states as queer and trans* subjects. My learnings from the above do not lie in opposition to, but in juxtaposition to the political logic manifested in the election manifestos. The juxtaposition allows an engagement with the subtle and sometimes ambivalent politics of queer and trans* participation with/in state populism. While keeping in mind the divergences between populist logics of state actors and the emergence of critical queer and trans* voices, it may also be noteworthy to ask when collective efforts deploy logics of empowerment, constitutional rights, recognition to gain redressal from violence, guarantees of livelihood and inclusion in public and private institutions, if these too fall within the ambit of homopopulism. By saying this, I am not falling back upon a politics of collusion that homonationalism/homohindunationalism can illuminate, but instead opening up a space to engage with activist spaces as popular counterpoints that may not be captured within and exceed these conceptual registers. Employing social media and digital spaces, popular cultural and graphic artifacts, filmmaking, and storytelling, each of these registers, in different ways, create areas of reconfigured family and community to re-imagine a different order of citizenship and democracy.

The salience of homopopulism is thus not given but offers a way to engage with popular politics that is a reality in a postcolonial state such as India. The violent continuities between the colonial and postcolonial orders have rendered gender and sexual minorities, in particular those who are from historically oppressed caste, classes, religion and region as part of the “fearful others” or those that need to be catered to in paper, if not in actual affirmative policymaking. Thus, a large part of queer and trans* politics is about proactively and critically engaging with populist states to be accountable for gender and sexual justice. Can such engagements be sweepingly read as projects to ally with statist practices from centers of academic privilege (commonly located in the global north)? Or can they be read (and critically examined) as context specific struggles that articulate with/in homopopulist moments? Whether these voices can be followed and read as radical popular politics remains to be seen. But at this moment, we need to hold on to these voices to imagine liveable presents and refuse pre-decided futures.

Conclusion

As LGBTQ as a category solidifies within election promises, a new layer of queer politics is visible on the national political scene that is populist. This paper has argued for the use of homopopulism, along with homonationalism and homohindunationalism, to understand modes of populist incorporation of LGBTQ identifying persons in India. Homopopulism offers a conceptual entry point to know how nation states and political parties engage with non-heterosexual gender-sexual expressions, practices, and identities. The conceptual and analytical work of homopopulism is not predetermined. It can be deployed in spaces where inclusive promises across left-liberal, centrist and right-wing states do not lead to legal reforms and affirmative action policies. Homopopulism is not to be read as a subset of homonationalism and homohindunationalism but an allied category that helps illuminate those spaces of excess where the struggle for dignity and inclusion cannot be understood as assimilation. Collective efforts to gain redressal from violence, guarantees of livelihood, inclusion in public and private institutions, and negotiating with left-liberal, centrist, and hardliner states in its everyday functioning has to be distinguished from queer and trans* complicities with Brahmanical and Islamophobic discourses. My interest in presenting homopopulism to articulate these moments at an academic-activist scale is not to predict but to ally with those who seek, circulate and reconfigure concepts to intervene to build liveable presents and imagine just futures.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

Current Affiliation: Dr. Niharika Banerjea, Professor, Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Niharika Banerjea

Notes

Niharika Banerjea is associate professsor of Sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi. She is also a visiting research scientist at the School of Geography, University College Dublin.

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