India: Queer march for Azaadi (Freedom) by 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.”
The demands of the organizers were -
1.Equal opportunities in terms of socio-political and economic representations for the LGBTQI community.
2. Provide security to minority communities / individuals from mob lynchings by radical groups.
3. Honor the NALSA judgement passed by the Supreme Court in 2014 and scrap the Transgender Bill which "suffocates the ideology and basic framework" of the judgement.
4. Give Kashmiri people the right to determine their national identity themselves.
5. Call off the the idea of detention camps proposed under the National Register of Citizens (NRC) implementation.
6.Stop labeling every protest and critique against the government as anti-national and scrap the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) amendment Bill.
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