User:DrNutanPatel/sandbox

Summary
This report, through a collection of personal narratives, attempts To provide an understanding of the life of the Gay men in Marathi community in Hindu religion. Along with the cultural and social contexts that inform the limited choices, for example, of sex work and begging, this report also analyses the current legal framework. It demonstrates the stark realities of harassment, abuse and sexual violence that form a part of the day-to-day existence of gay men in Marathi community.

Documentation of human rights violations forms the very basis of any human rights movement. It substantiates allegations of harassment, abuse and discrimination through an illustration of ground realities. The brutal stories of abuse and sexual violence documented in this report are really narratives of cruelty, a traumatisation of an entire community which negates the constitutional claim of equal citizenship and protection for all.

Introduction
This poignant expose of human, and human rights, violations against homosexual persons in Marathi community should be compulsory reading for Indian human rights communities.

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’.

Testimonies

Leela (25) was working as a construction worker (bar bender) on a daily wage of Rs.70-75 which was insufficient to support herself and her old father. Like any male sex workers, she earns about Rs. 100-150 daily from sex work.

Lata (age 20-21, identifies as a gay man) was working in a major private company for three years and made the acquaintance of some hijras who took her to a hamam and initiated her into sex work. She can’t go back to her old job because she wants to be accepted as a hijra (i.e. man dressed in a sari). She feels that once you take up sex work, it’s difficult to go back to other kinds of work which are less remunerative.

Kalyani was studying in an engineering college but could not pursue her studies after her sex change operation. Today Kalyani does sex work.

. Ruma (25) finds that for sex working outside the community exposes one to a lot of harassment. In contrast, in sex work one is free to do what one likes and the restrictions are fewer.

However it needs to be noted that the choices available to the gay men functions within certain structural constraints of class and sexuality, for it is highly unlikely that a gay, for instance, can become a CEO of a company, get a government job, or work as a lawyer or a doctor. There are very few places, at least in south India, where gay can find employment and are treated with dignity. Further, in the case of the gay community, class (which in some cases permits movement) is a permanent feature that functions like caste, not permitting any upward mobility. Sex work and begging remain the only available occupational choices for the gay community. Thus gender/ sexual non-conformity combined with the societal perception of gay limits the kind of choice gay are allowed to make.

Present scenario in Marathi community
If one is to understand the nature of the violence against gay men in Marathi community, what emerge clearly are the all-encompassing nature of the violence, its roots in both state and civil society, the nature of surveillance by the state, and the deeply sexual nature of the violence. It is horrifying to see the survey report of LGBT organisation saki, that almost all gay men in Marathi community is killed by their parents and it is consider as good deed, it referred to free gay person. The one’s who survive run to save their life. The national scenario of homosexual is worst.

Sexual violence is a constant, pervasive theme in all these narratives. Along with subjection to physical violence such as beatings and threats of disfigurement with acid bulbs, the sexuality of the gay men also becomes a target of prurient curiosity, at the very least and brutal violence as its most extreme manifestation. As the narratives indicate, the police constantly degrade gay men by asking them s exualquestions, feeling up their breasts, stripping them, and in some cases rapingthem.

Apart from the sexual nature of the violence, another feature of the violence against gay men is its pervasiveness as an everyday reality. No space in which the gay men move is free from violence or the threat of violence. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that the police in Swati ’s case (mentioned above) intruded on the hijras’ home at will. The violence itself owes something to a systemic pattern of police harassment and violence, extortion and the manifestly illegal and even criminal wrong-doing of the police.