On this Independence Day, as India marks 79 years of sovereignty, we need to reflect on the promise of freedom that our tricolour represents. Freedom was supposed to mean equality, dignity, and the right to live as oneself. Yet, for millions of queer lives in this country, independence remains a word heavy with irony and loss. This nation may chant songs of liberty, but in the daily realities of queer lives, the silence of unfreedom persists.
Seventy-nine years after shedding colonial chains, queer people in India still bear the weight of second-class citizenship. Our legal system, so proud of its foundational equality, has for decades refused queer people the full spectrum of rights that are the birthright of every citizen. This marginalization is not only written into laws, but sewn into the fabric of government systems and social attitudes.
Take the transgender community. It wasn’t until the 2014 Supreme Court judgment in the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) case that the law even acknowledged the existence and rights of transgender persons. Before NALSA, trans Indians were invisible in the statute books. After NALSA, however, justice remains a mirage: both central and state governments have failed to fully carry out the court’s directives to secure basic protections like education, affirmative action, healthcare, that are theoretically guaranteed. These failures are not bureaucratic oversights; they are a careless betrayal by the state.
Far worse, the government offices themselves are often a source of harm. Trans people routinely face harassment, extortion, and violence at the hands of those entrusted to protect—police officers themselves. Reports of intimidation, wrongful detention, and mockery are not isolated incidents, but patterns that have become all too familiar to the community.
Society, too, is stubbornly resistant to change. The most basic acts of living like finding housing, enrolling in school, securing a job, remain fraught with the threat of violence, exclusion, or legal action. Queer and trans Indians are forced to go to court time and again, not for extraordinary rights, but for the right to a home, an education, safety, and dignity.
Same-sex couples, in particular, know this persecution in cruelly intimate ways. Even after the abolition of Section 377, the shadow of criminality lingers. Couples are torn apart by family threats, police harassment, or community violence. Many risk everything for love, but the law still refuses to recognize their unions as families. This denial of dignity—of adoption, inheritance, spousal rights, and even recognition under marriage law—underscores a stark truth: for queer Indians, freedom remains conditional.
This Independence Day, let us not drown out inconvenient truths with a patriotic blanket. Our freedom is incomplete; our revolution unfinished. India cannot claim true independence while its queer citizens remain shackled by injustice. It is time for every Indian, from parliament to panchayat, from the courts to the kitchen table, to answer a simple question: For whom do we declare freedom? True liberation demands we bring queer people into the fold—granting them not tolerance, but equal rights, recognition, and an unassailable claim to dignity. Only then will the promise of independence ring true for all.
~Written by Sage
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