Sex workers deserve the colours of freedom too. Will Indians stand up for them as well?

Voices

Homosexuality isn’t illegal in India. Neither is sex work. It’s just homosexual acts that are criminalized under Section 377, as “unnatural sex”, which gives arbitrary powers to the police to harass men. It isn’t illegal to engage in sex work, you just can’t “solicit” for clients in public, or run a brothel. The law is meant prevent to “immoral trafficking”, but the police often jail sex workers and even torture them. Both the LGBTQ and sex worker communities number a few million, but there is no definite number for either. Members of both communities face similar kinds of harassment, stigma and marginalization, but the Indian people have treated the two communities rather differently. When the Supreme Court of the United States of India held that same-sex marriages were a fundamental right, the White House Twitter handle changed its picture to an image of a rainbow-coloured White House. Presumably inspired by this, Facebook came up with a tool that let users paint their own photographs with the rainbow colours of the Pride movement. A of Indian people used the tool and posted images of themselves in the rainbow, and it’s great that they are open about their support for gay men and lesbian women. But couched in the language of Bollywood-style love and marriage, homosexual relationships get a lot of support from a large section of educated, upwardly mobile people. This gives gay rights visibility, and by extension, positive media coverage and a favourable impression in the public imagination. But who’s going to say they paid for sex? Not the men who go looking for “prostitutes” in the bus stands, bylanes and brothels of urban and rural India. Nor the men and women who approach “escort” agencies which advertise their services online and charge anywhere between a few thousand and many thousands of rupees for male and female “escorts”. There are many fault lines that we have not yet managed to face up to. Class and caste are two of them. Gender would have been a third, but biological sex, gender and sexuality are central to both LGBTQ rights issues and sex work. Even within gender issues, both caste and class operate in visible and invisible ways. Take for instance, a display of a class-bias in a public interest advertisement on drinking and driving “My husband made me a prostitute”. The advertisement was lauded, but it revealed a terribly moralistic and highly misguided view of sex work. Read: Why 'My husband made me a prostitute' campaign just misses the point And also take for instance, the episode of equal rights activist Harrish Iyer’s mother advertising for a groom for her son, “preferably Iyer”, but nonetheless “caste no bar”. There were the eternal optimists who shouted down those who pointed out the casteism evident in the advertisement. Read: The casteist gay-groom ad is a hard lesson for civil rights activists Of course, the act of advertising for a groom for a gay man in the matrimonial columns of Indian newspapers – which routinely provide proof our casteist society with its penchant for fair skin – was a step towards discussing homosexuality and normalizing it. However, let’s not lull ourselves into a false sense of pride in our own progressiveness. Being a Facebook progressive is good, but we need to stand up and be counted when the occasion calls for it. Sex workers are possibly more harassed and trouble than gay men and lesbian women. They too deserve the colours of freedom. Will people stand up for them too?

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