Braving all odds, transgender candidates take LS poll plunge

Intersex people are always invisibilised. My whole aim is for dignity, and freedom to live as human beings

ASWATHI RAJAPPAN, Independent candidate

A kinnar finds no job, no family support or a home. But we live. If we can fight hunger, we can fight elections BHAVANI NATH VALMIKI , AAP candidate from Prayagraj

NEWDELHI: Aswathi Rajappan had barely stepped out of the house in Kerala’s Ernakulam when local policemen called out. They ringfenced Rajappan and a friend and asked what they were doing in a public place. When told the 25-year-old graduate was an independent candidate in the ongoing elections , the policemen laughed.

“They threw insults at me, they said I didn’t look like a candidate, and the impression I gave was that of a criminal because of my skin colour. What is this impression but bias? This is why I am fighting the election.”

Rajappan, who identifies as a Dalit intersex person and uses the pronoun ‘ze’ (instead of he or she), is one of a small group of transgender people fighting the Lok Sabha elections. These candidates come from across castes and regions – from Gujarat in the west and Tamil Nadu in the south to Odisha in the east and Uttar Pradesh in the north -- and represent the rapid strides made by the marginalised community barely five years after the Supreme Court upheld their rights in a landmark judgment, known as Nalsa vs Union of India.

Rajappan was stirred to join politics because of the high rates of crime against transgender people and a commitment to anticaste principles. “Intersex people are always invisibilised. My whole aim is for dignity, and freedom to live as human beings. I want people to accept us as we are,” says Rajappan, who is taking Congress’s Hibi Eden, Union minister KJ Alphons and CPI(M)’S P Rajeev. Thousands of kilometers apart, Bhavani Nath Valmiki is fighting her own electoral battle. Valmiki was nominated by AAP from Prayagraj.

The north India head of the Kinnar Akhada, a Hindu monastic order of transpeople, Valmiki says she could have fought from a reserved seat but chose the highprofile constituency to show that a person tagged as “reserved” can fight in a so-called “general” seat. “I entered politics for social good and my poll pitch will be unemployment. We don’t fear terrorism, we fear lack of jobs for the young.”

Valmiki, who is known as Bhavani Maa to legions of her followers in the Akhada, says the capability of a transperson will determine their outcome, not their gender.

“A kinnar (loose Hindi translation for transperson) finds no job, no family support or a home. But we live. If we can fight hunger, we can fight elections.”

LONG HISTORY

Dressed in a green sari, Shabnam “mausi” made history when she stepped into the MP assembly in March 2000 as the first transgender MLA in India.

Shabnam mortgaged her jewellery for the campaign and a follower gave her a car. “You cannot imagine the atmosphere. We would be driving and singing all night, making insults for the parties, in the car; making jingles with drums.

I never thought I could win, but the people made me their own.” Just a year before her win, another transgender person – Kamala Jaan – was elected the mayor of Katni but her election was struck down, first by a tribunal, and then by the high court in 2003 on the ground that the position was reserved for a woman