What kind of gap do you hope Unfinished Equality will address in the sphere of queerness in India and the discussions around it?

I wouldn’t imagine Unfinished Equality as something that can really fill up a gap in something as big as queerness in India. But the point that I have tried to make in the book is that as a movement, decriminalisation was only one milestone in a long journey. After that, we were supposed to focus on anti-discrimination because that is where our society at large also needs to come together. Our society, our cultures—we are not a monolith—and our imagination should be caught up with the idea of how to minimise discrimination in society, and this is a socio-legal matter, not just a matter of another legislation or a court verdict.

It is also about the curriculum or syllabi we have in schools and colleges, the films we make, the television programming we have, the writings we produce, all of that matters, and it should be focussed on looking at how we discriminate. I think that our cultures at one level are some of the most discriminatory in the world because you look at the religious and caste discrimination that is prevalent, which I don’t think we still deal with in an honest manner. So, I think my book is really trying to focus attention on the issue of minimising discrimination. And that’s where the title also comes in, though, it became some kind of a premonition because soon after the book was published, the government slapped us with The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026.

Pawan Dhall, author of Unfinished Equality. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

How has your idea of family shifted over the decades of your activism, and what draws you to friendship as its foundation?

The definition of family at some level has been something that we were grappling with way back in the 1990s also. In 1994 at the Naz-Humsafar conference held in Mumbai, we discussed looking at family afresh, redefining it as something which is inclusive of diversity, and inclusive of differences. Then again, in 1997, we had a conference on lesbian, bisexual and gay strategising, again in Mumbai, where we talked about looking at a definition of family which was not heteronormative, which is not based on compulsory marriage, but on friendship. This is an idea which has caught my imagination in recent years because I have always held that friendship is the basis for any relationship.

The Deed of Familial Association, which has also come up in Tamil Nadu as part of their sexual and gender minorities policy that queer and trans groups have been advocating for—I think that it is quite an interesting concept to be pursued legally. My friend and colleague Namrata [Mukherjee] has written about this in Varta, that the idea of Deed of Familial Association points out that any family should be seen not in terms of how it appears but in terms of what it does for its members. We need to move beyond the heterosexual stereotype of family—husband, wife and two children—and focus on whether these are happy families, supportive and respectful of each other’s aspirations. I think that is my definition of family.

“I think my book is really trying to focus attention on the issue of minimising discrimination.” | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

In this book you have talked about a lot of organisations and groups. In your assessment, how did the work of non-queer groups help the movement, and what does meaningful allyship look like going forward?

I don’t think we would have gotten where we have, good or bad, without allies. In the history of the Counsel Club, for example, when the group was just about six months old, we met two very important individuals, Dr Sujit Ghosh, a psychiatrist who also specialised in sexual health, and Veena Lakhumalani, a social worker. Both of them were involved in running the West Bengal Sexual Health Project, which was one of the earliest of its kind in India. They were among the first people who pointed out that HIV has underlined the inequities in our society and we have to address those inequities through change in laws, change in policies, change in social attitudes.

There were also other NGOs like the Thoughtshop Foundation, of which I was also part. We came out with a newspaper column called “AIDS Sex Knowledge for Young People”, that came out in The Statesman in 1996-97. It helped us to reach out to an entirely different demographic of young people, many of whom were gay and lesbian. They’ve also been running Youth Resource Cells in West Bengal and Odisha, which aren’t typical LGBT support groups, but they have a pretty good mix of gender and sexuality diversity. They have managed to sensitise parents of those children in rural and slum areas. This is like a parallel movement which is inclusive. We don’t always want to create separate groups. We want people to have space within their own larger communities. We don’t want to live on an island. We want to have dignified lives in the middle of wherever we were born or wherever we have grown up.

The queer community in India exists between hypervisibility and invisibilisation. How do you think the community should navigate both extremes, especially in this age of social media, without losing the depth of its politics?

I think that in a way, both mean the same thing, because both are actually missing out on the essence of queer lives. I was just talking to a friend of mine that for instance, I always had reservations about Instagram, but then there has been this pressure that Varta Trust has to be visible on it. But then what do you say about an attention span that is just limited to a 10-slide carousel? It’s almost like people are not really paying attention, in spite of hypervisibility on social media. And then invisibilisation is something which the state is always attempting one way or the other.

Even before this Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, look at what the BNS [Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita] did after the removal of Section 377. No laws to penalise same-sex sexual assault. What is that if not invisibilisation? If you are sexually assaulted, there’s nothing for you except maybe some laws around violence. The Internet really helped in networking, outreach, sensitisation, and all of that, but it also has impacted our mental health. It is now an excess, where, actually, people are not really connected. We need actual physical support group meetings. We need people to sit with each other, fraternise, understand each other, look at each other’s concerns, diversities, and similarities, and take it from there. We need pride marches, as they still attract large numbers, but then the protest element is so much diluted in some of the pride marches, which is a concern.

With recent legal setbacks threatening hard-won gains, where should the community focus its energy right now?

So, this is a bit complex, but let me try and explain what I have in mind. Let’s say that the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 now does not change. It remains the way it is. Then my message to the community is: pull up your socks, get together, sit and brainstorm, and please do not just do it virtually. Get together as far as possible, be with each other, and think of ways. Let us build bridges with people who’ll help us out. The Friendship Walk of 1999 was all about friendship, about building bridges. So, we need to do that now more and more. Are there enough shelters today? There are garima grihas [shelter homes] for transpeople which are supposed to get funds from the government but they’ve been facing funding challenges. The government is scuttling its own programme, which they started with so much fanfare in 2020.

So, what are the alternatives? An adult person, irrespective of gender or sexuality, should be able to make their own decisions about leaving home. To support that, we will have to create alternative shelters if the government ones are not functioning. Then again, the book was essentially triggered by the marriage equality debate in the Supreme Court. My introduction makes it very clear I’m not against marriage equality, but I would first want to focus on equality within marriage. By that I mean equality in a much larger substantive form, not just in a reductive way. I think we need to go back to focussing on removing discrimination, chipping away at the system which is discriminating against us.