India: Queer march for Azaadi (Freedom)

Puja Bhattacharjee

A year ago, on September 6, the Supreme Court of India partially decriminalized the 158-year-old colonial law under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which criminalized consensual unnatural sex. On the first anniversary of the historic verdict, the West Bengal Forum for Gender and Sexual minority rights organized a rally in Kolkata to “look directly in the eye of our oppressors, to claim what has been strategically denied to us.” The organizers believe that it is their political and humanitarian duty to support other marginalized communities. The anthem for the march was “No one is free until everyone is free.”