Human Rights Violations Against the Transgender Community
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Human Rights violations against the transgender community A study of kothi and hijra sex workers in Bangalore, India September 2003 Report by Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties, Karnataka (PUCL-K) Publishing history Edition : September 2003 Published : English Edition : 1000 Kannada Edition : 1000 Suggested : INR -- Rs. 50/- contribution USD -- $ 5 GBP -- £ 3 Published by : PUCL-K Layout & Design : Vinay Printed at : Any paragraph in this publication may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted as necessary. The authors only assert the right to be identified with the reproduced version. Table of Contents Foreword .............................................................................. 6 Acknowledgements ............................................................... 3 Chapter I –– Introduction Summary .................................................................... 7 Need and purpose of this report .................................. 7 Methodology ................................................................ 8 Chapter II –– Social, cultural and political context of kothis and hijras Who are hijras and kothis ? .......................................... 11 A window into the history of hijras and kothis .............. 11 The context of marginalization .................................... 11 Chapter III –– Violence and abuse : Testimonies of kothis and hijra sexworkers Harassment by the police in public places ................... 11 Harassment at home .................................................... 11 Police entrapment ........................................................ 11 Abuse/ harassment in police stations ........................... 11 Rape in jails ................................................................. 11 Chapter IV –– Understanding the institutional basis of the violence Family .......................................................................... 11 Law .............................................................................. 11 Medical establishment .................................................. 11 Media ........................................................................... 11 Table of Contents Chapter V –– Kothi and hijra sexworkers’ organizing in Bangalore Formation of a collective by the hijra/kothi community .............................................................. 11 Crisis intervention in cases of violence ....................... 11 Increasing visibility in local and national media .......... 11 Chapter VI –– What does the future hold? How existing existing legal frameworks can be mobilised for the hijra and kothi community ............. 11 How the existing legal frameworks can be challenged ............................................................... 11 Use of progressive international legal developments .......................................................... 11 Chapter VII: Recommendations .......................................... 11 Chapter VIII: Resources List ............................................... 11 Annexure I .......................................................................... 11 Annexure II ......................................................................... 11 Annexure III ....................................................................... 11 Annexure IV ........................................................................ 11 Annexure V ......................................................................... 11 Annexure VI ........................................................................ 11 Annexure VII ...................................................................... 11 Annexure VIII ..................................................................... 11 Annexure IX ........................................................................ 11 Annexure X ......................................................................... 11 5 Foreword This poignant expose of human, and human rights, violations against transgender persons and communities should be compulsory reading for Indian human rights communities. The dominant discourse on human rights in India has yet to come to terms with the production/ reproduction of absolute human rightlessness of transgender communities. The work in your hands not merely foregrounds the microfascism of the local police state, it also archives practices of everyday resistance to it and a programschift for a more inclusive formation of human rights movement in India. At stake is the human right to be different, the right to recognition of different pathways of sexuality, a right to immunity from the oppressive and repressive labelling of despised sexuality. Such a human right does not yet exist in India; this work summons activist energies first towards its fully- fledged normative enunciation and second towards its attainment, enjoyment, and realisation. Always a formidable enterprise, it remains even more so in the contemporary regime sponsored xenophobic militant Hindutva ‘culture’. This monograph highlights the distinctions between nascent lesbigay and transgender movements. The right to sexual orientation and conduct aims itself in the former domain at liberation from heterosexist and homophobic politics of cultural denial of equal worth of all human beings. It affirms lesbigay right to difference constituting a new frontier of ‘universal’ human rights. Transgender communities extend this contestation even further. They crystallize queer theory and its politics. The difference is crucial. Lesbigay struggles pursue The dominant affirmative remedies; queer politics, in contrast, seeks discourse on human transformative ones. Nancy Fraser felicitously articulates (in her rights in India has Justice Interrptus, 1997:24) the contrast thus: yet to come to terms with the production/ Affirmative remedies for homophobia and heterosexism reproduction of are currently associated with gay-identity politics, which absolute human aims to revalue gay and lesbian identity. Transformative rightlessness of remedies, in contrast, are associated with queer politics, transgender communities. 6 Human Rights violations against the transgender community which would deconstruct the homo-hetero dichotomy…so as to destabilize all fixed sexual identities. The point is not to dissolve all sexual differences in a single, universal human identity; it is ,rather, to sustain a sexual field of multiple, debinarized, fluid, ever-shifting differences. The remarkable ‘testimonies’ of hijras and kothis assembled in this monograph bring alive this insight in the contexts of ‘unthinkable violence’ (p.24) mirrored by police atrocities but reflecting its ‘roots in deeper social structures’ (p. 39). The point, however, about all unthinkable violence is that precisely its un-thinkability remains ceaselessly thought. The monograph in its mapping of structural violence, the standardless use of force by state and civil society actors and agencies, and of the images of emancipatory struggles, remains ambivalent concerning ‘the’ law. How especially the narratives of ‘mobilization process’ against perpetual humiliation and violence against these communities (pp.60-67) may relate to respect for gay rights as human rights in terms of implementation and renovation of the Indian Constitution and the law (pp.68-78) is a question continually posed here. If the law is the crooked mirror of perverse social domination, it’s smashing, the ‘trashing’ of the law, is at best an idle pastime. However, if the law is also a constitutive condition of production/reproduction of despised sexuality, it offers among the first sites of struggle against cultural and political domination. On this site, the struggle necessarily assumes the form of rights-talk. It entails juridicalization of identity movements. If it promises and even delivers identity rights first in the shape of rights of discrete and insular minorities and second as an instance of the human right to equality, and non-discrimination, rights-talk also amounts to externalization, as it were, of movements for politics of recognition often subversive of inner solidarities. The rights discourse serves thus, and simultaneously, the logics of regulation as well as emancipation1. The principal message of this monograph goes beyond the eminently desirable and feasible programs of effective legal action. The struggle assuredly goes beyond (to evoke a happy phrase of Santos) the glacial time of law reform. Legal and juristic triggers furnish merely fungible initial (even if at times inaugural) strategies in a combat against millennially based human, and human rights, violation. The monograph suggests a broader coalition of strategies against the myriad modes of ‘gratuitous violence’ (p.39) against transgender communities’ located on the axis of cultural taboos against ‘transgressive sexuality/ gender’ articulation and the political economy, as it were, of despised sexualities. It Human Rights violations against the transgender community 7 accentuates the precious, but always precarious, nexus between human rights and social movements. Put another way, at stake is the absent figure of the transsexual as a servitor of the distinctively cultural, economic, and political hegemonic basic needs. The narratives assembled here silhouette the histories of these hegemonic ‘needs’. This precious monograph addresses the mission of human rights as contesting discrimination in its most profound sense, as a source and a seat of continual mode of production of the distinctively recalcitrant form of