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Violence Against the Law

The essay looks at the legal struggles fought on behalf of what has been characterized as a progressive ‘LGBTQ movement’ for the rights of sexual minorities and argues that these struggles have been ill-thought and amount to a violation of the law and an inversion of law’s role in social life. While law and changes in the law emerge from social struggle, these legal battles have sought to short-circuit that struggle and effect social change through the juridical. This amounts to violence upon the law and upon communities of sexual minorities, like the hijras, whom these legal struggles claim to represent. Closely examining the Naz judgement of the Delhi High Court, the Koushal judgement of the Supreme Court and the NALSA judgement on ‘transgenders’, the essay argues that we need to re-think our negotiation and languages of the law and rely on deep sociological engagement rather than abstract ‘progressive’ lingo to change the law and the world.