Why queer safety in India remains a daily negotiation

Param Sahib Singh, a fashion creator based in Delhi, was walking in Connaught Place on a winter evening when he was suddenly grabbed from behind by some men. They covered his face with a cloth, threw him to the ground, punching him, calling him a disgrace to Sikhism.

Singh’s offence? He is an out and queer Sikh fashion creator, unashamed to pose with make-up, accessories, and turban. He says he’s faced trolling before and his studio has been vandalised. But when his Reels went viral and his followers on Instagram skyrocketed from 40k to 350k in one year, the game changed. This escalation reflects how precarious queer safety in India remains, even as visibility is gradually growing in urban public life. “The eyeballs increased but the hate also increased,” says Singh, who found himself face down and bleeding in the heart of India’s capital city.

This incident occurred in November 2025, seven years after the landmark Supreme Court verdict which partially struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that decriminalised same-sex relations between consenting adults. In those seven years, Pride Marches have sprouted all over the country. There are LGBTQ+ film festivals, drag queen extravaganzas at five-star hotels, and queer karaoke nights at bars. Visibility has certainly expanded, but acceptance remains uneven. The harder question is whether LGBTQ+ safety in India has meaning beyond mere symbolism.

When violence jeopardises queer safety in India

A 2024 study published in the BMC Public Health Journal surveyed 300 MSM (men who have sex with men) across six cities and found most were exposed to some form of queer violence in India, whether sexual, physical or verbal.  Kolkata hosted the first ever Pride Walk in India back in 1999. But 80 per cent of those surveyed in Kolkata had faced violence—sexual, physical or verbal—the highest in India. Across the cities, 56 per cent had even faced murder threats.

The sample size of the survey is admittedly small but the violence is a reality. And has been so for years. The violence has appeared, repeatedly, across decades, cities, and institutions, as enumerated below:

2004. Pushkin Chandra, an employee of UNDP and his partner Kuldeep were found dead in their home in Delhi, stabbed about 30 times with kitchen knives. Two men were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010. But the coverage of the case focused more on the “dissolute” lifestyle of affluent gay men than on the crime itself. Even the judge said, “It is evident from the record Pushkin Chandra used to indulge in unnatural sexual activities”.

2011-12. When Balbir Krishan, a self-taught disabled artist from a Jat village in Uttar Pradesh, put together a queer-themed show at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi the work (and Krishan  himself) were attacked by a masked intruder during off hours. “After I got engaged to a man in 2013, I lost my family and my job, and escaped the village for fear of safety,” says Krishan. In 2016, he left India and now lives in New York.

2021. In the Amazon Prime series In Transit, Rie, a Dalit transwoman from Pune talks about being attacked by some men at 5:15 pm, in broad daylight. They stomped on her face and chest, kicked her in the crotch. Fourteen months later, Rie said, the police had not bothered to call her to make a sketch of the suspects.

In Transit is not a series about queer safety. It is about the diversity of transgender lives from metro cities to villages, across caste and class. “But I think almost all the characters have some experience of being threatened at the very least to being actually assaulted at the very worst,” says its director Ayesha Sood. And the violence happens not just from unknown masked assailants in a public space, but from known individuals too.

Legal loopholes hampering action against queer violence in India

Queer safety in India, in fact, begins at home. Shirsho Basu, a research scholar in cognitive science in Kolkata, says their parents did not object to their crossdressing but their elder brother was hostile. He would threaten to cut off their hair. Basu stopped crossdressing whilst at home. In 2023, bruised and battered, they fled home. A medical report found their shoulder had been dislocated. A violent incident had happened once earlier, in 2017, but at that time their father was still alive. “He had been a protective shield,” says Basu. “Now that was gone.”

But in 2023, Basu had a protective shield they weren’t aware of in 2017. Transgender activist Anurag Maitreyee helped them get a police medical report and lodge an FIR. When the local police station showed disinterest, they kickstarted a signature campaign on social media. Basu's extended family was aghast but their brother was hauled up in court and eventually pleaded guilty.

“In 2017, after I returned home, he sneered: ‘Oh, he came back? I would not have.’ This time he was surprised I filed an FIR,” shares Basu. The extended family had assumed that Basu was too “weak and submissive” to ever retaliate. Basu learned something through that bitter experience. “I understood I have to strategise my own resistance.” There has been no violence since.

Basu’s story shows both what has changed in terms of queer safety and how far we have to go. “On paper the laws can be a lot more progressive,” says Sood. “But things get loopy when it comes to implementation of the law or even understanding it.”

In fact, many queer people felt very empowered after the Supreme Court struck down Section 377 because they thought the law was on their side finally, says Suhail Abbasi, co-founder and chairperson of Humsafar Trust in Mumbai. “But they didn’t realise it takes a long time to percolate down from judiciary to the local thana. Still people get blackmailed, still people get threatened, still people get conned.”Earlier the crisis cases Humsafar Trust got were mostly about external threats—blackmailers at cruising sites, or police constables who used the threat of Section 377 to extort money. “That has gone down considerably,” says Abbasi. “But with the advent of online dating apps, new threats have emerged. You meet someone on an app, invite them home, and suddenly the bell rings and two people show up threatening to expose you unless you pay them off.” In the old days they could empty out your wallet. Then they could force you to go to an ATM.  Now they can just have you transfer them money through a mobile payment app. Ashu Goyal, advocacy officer of Humsafar Trust, says they often deal with 4-5 crisis calls about blackmail daily. In 2022, the Ahmedabad police nabbed a gang that had used Grindr to rob at least 15-20 people in four months, according to Reuters.

Queer rights seem insignificant in the face of an intolerant society

This is not to say nothing has changed. Malobika, co-founder of Sappho for Equality, eastern India’s first support group for lesbians, bisexual women, and trans masculine persons, remembers how unsafe it was to even run a helpline in 2000. They could not run ads for it. They only accepted incoming calls for two hours a week. They would put up the helpline number in women’s toilets or surreptitiously stick a flyer on the seat of a bus. 

Safety was not just an issue for the women who came to Sappho. It was an issue for the women running Sappho too. “Once we learned from a regular member that police were going to raid us. They had been told we were running a sex club and our house was filled with obscene materials. Another time, I remember our driver going through signals and driving into lanes to throw off a motorbike tailing us. We had no police help. But we still tried to find allies in police stations.”

Now, she says, the newer generation is more assertive about their rights. They demand security from the state. If the police will not provide security there are other options like homes and shelters. Social media can help as it did for Basu and Singh.

But queer victims also have to help themselves. “If we manage to recover some of the money, many of the victims of blackmail and extortion don’t want to proceed further,” says Goyal at Humsafar Trust. “There is still the fear of society.”

Singh went to the police station but chose not to file an FIR. “My father told me to leave it and just come home,” he says. His father had already faced the wrath of aggrieved Sikh community members in the gurdwara. At that time, Singh had been forced to delete all his artwork from Instagram because he had dared to draw a turbaned Sikh character who had sex with men. He’s been told he will be safer if he moves abroad, or at least to Mumbai. “But why should I move?” says Singh. “I’m not the one at fault.”

Basu says the FIR made the situation easier for him but the law cannot guarantee safety. “I can go out of my house in a sari but I have to think whether I can come home safely in a sari at night. I have never been closeted, but I have also learned to not do things that make me vulnerable.”

Lodging an FIR is a valuable tool but not a magic bullet when it comes to safety. Safety is more holistic—it means different things for different people. Vikas Narula, co-founder of the nightclub Depot 48 in Delhi says, “Safety can’t be one rule. It has to be 100 tiny little signals we try to get right every night.”  The nightclub has no bouncers; they rely on reading the room. Narula once noticed that the guests at a table were staring at a queer couple holding hands, “a slow burn of attention that queer people instantly recognise”. He asked the couple if they were okay, and then had a quiet conversation at the other table.

“There was no drama or escalation, but just a gentle boundary. Making sure queer folks feel safe is delicate work. But I have been at the receiving end of stares and shame in the past, so I know exactly why it matters.” In post-377 India, queer safety still remains a work in progress.