Opinion | The Many Suicides Of Ilaichi.... India's LGBT Are Not Yet Full Citizens

There is an often-overlooked but crucial difference between legal and social discrimination. Even when the laws endow one with equal rights, social oppression may and often does deprive one of those rights. In such a situation, those who are able to obtain legal support can go to court to demand one’s rights. Many people cannot reach the courts and the question becomes one of how to empower them.

But many rights are still legally denied to LGBT people. Most other citizens take these rights so much for granted that they do not even think about them. One such is the right not to be dismissed from your job because of your personal relationship. In 1987, when Leela Namdeo and Urmila Srivastava, two police constables in Madhya Pradesh, married each other, they were suspended from their jobs. This type of discrimination continues today in many job sectors, and forces people into hiding and pretending.

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From at least 1980 onwards, the press has been reporting cases from all over the country of non-English speaking, low-income group couples, mostly women, who have married each other by religious rituals, and who have often been driven to commit joint suicide. Even those couples whose families accepted their unions faced social discrimination and were unprotected by the law; for example, when Jaya Verma and Tanuja Chouhan, two nurses, married in 2001 in a ceremony hosted by their families in Patna, their landlord asked them to vacate their room the next day.

In my 2005 book, Love’s Rite (to be reissued shortly with an updated list of couples), I documented scores of such unions, which continue unabated today. After 2005, I continued to collect reports, and I found that their frequency increased, with more reports of male couples committing suicide than there had been in the 1980s and ’90s. For every reported case, there were dozens reported only in local papers, and dozens more not reported at all. These rural and small-town couples included Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Dalits, adivasis, factory and farm workers, fisherwomen and students, but had no connection with any LGBT or feminist movement. Homosexuality was illegal in India and most of these young Indians had never heard words such as “homosexual”, “lesbian” or “gay”. They acted on their irresistible feelings as a way of claiming the rights they were denied—the rights to liberty, equality and justice that are guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.

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Some LGBT and civil rights organisations today do great work to help couples who elope. In a 2005 case, activists in Mumbai and Delhi had to face violence from a couple’s family and the police, who broke into the activists’ home and threatened to kill them. Though the two women were educated and employed, they were terrified and it took them years to partially reconcile with their families. Even after that, they told me they felt isolated and wanted to migrate to Canada to find community acceptance.

In a 2004 case, Delhi activists had to shelter one partner in their home for years. Many couples living outside big cities cannot reach, or do not even know of, such safe harbours. This contributes to the continuing joint suicides, about which organisations find out ex post facto.

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While queer theorists and activists continue to debate whether or not LGBT people should enter the patriarchal institution of marriage (even while all of us continue to participate in every other patriarchal institution, from universities to banks), and while many homophobic people tell us that same-sex marriage is a western idea alien to Indian culture, young Indians have for decades been choosing to die because they are denied the right to marry, and the many rights that follow from marriage, such as the right to be recognised as next of kin for purposes of inheritance, decision-making, child custody and so on.

Here is an example of how not having such rights can affect one’s life. In 2004, an auto-rickshaw driver in Ahmedabad married her partner, a nurse, who in 2006 had a son by artificial insemination. The couple lived in complete isolation for four years, and in 2008 the nurse, who was depressed, hanged herself. Her family then claimed custody of the son. Another example of the practical effects of discrimination: if a man and woman who have never seen each other before their wedding get married, they immediately obtain many rights, including the right to Indian residency for a non-Indian spouse. But a same-sex couple that has lived together for 30 years and is legally married in another country has no rights at all, and the spouses are treated as legal strangers to one another.

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While many heterosexual couples are also persecuted and driven to joint suicide for their love, they have the law on their side if they can get social support to approach the law. Same-sex couples do not. This will change when not just same-sex couples but their communities demand justice for them.

In 2006, residents of a Bodo tribal village, Simlaguri, in Assam, asked candidates in the assembly elections to work to legalise the marriage of two women, Thingring Basumatary, a daily-wage labourer, and Roinathi Basumatary, a domestic help. The two Bodo women were in love since they were young girls, and got married in a Mahamaya temple in 1999. They were publicly whipped in their own village and had to flee. They moved from one village to another, but no one would employ them or allow them to settle down.

Finally, in Simlaguri, they found acceptance and have been happily living there for years. Their neighbours wanted them to have legal rights, and candidates of both parties promised to consider the demand. “We are also part of society…elected representatives also have responsibilities towards us,” Thingring told a journalist (‘Not Roads or Water: This couple wants a marriage’ by Samir Purkayastha, ToI, April 8, 2006). “Hope is the only thing we poor people have,” Thingring added.