Thank you very, very much for that very generous and very warm introduction that I just finished my amnesty in
intellectual history last year and I'm doing the MPP very fancy non academia related practical degree,
but I'm very excited to present today because I've been following the intellectual history seminar
since its inception and it is an honour to be able to present and to really set up the stage for,
I think, broad engagement around a topic that I've been involved in for the past few
years and also for sort of the development of critical scholarship around it.
At the very outset, I want to start off by saying what the stock is not about,
because we've had some online engagement on this and some of you might might have come from those online engagements.
So I welcome your inputs and your objections as they might be.
The stock is not about Kashmiri queerness or any form of Kashmiri quietness.
The stock is about the development of a particular strand of Hindu nationalism,
which has subsumed quietness within the ambit and weaponised the language of
LGBTQ rights to justify the abrogation of Article three seven in particular,
and the larger sort of occupation of the Chinese. Right.
So this is tracing developments within Hindu nationalism, its tracing its weaponization of LGBTQ rights officially.
It does not theorise or speak about Kashmiri queer resistance.
Also, although I'm happy to share about work being done in Kashmir by several friends and organisations that I sort of spent a lot of time with.
But again, this this comes from a very different space, so it's going to have three focus points.
One is on the diffuse origins of this narrative that presents India as emancipatory
and Indian presence in Kashmir as particularly beneficial for LGBTQ rights region.
The second thing it theorises around the implications for such a discourse for queerness within India and for queer people within India is one.
And the third thing is it sheds a little light and sort of tries to grapple with frameworks to
oppose this form of construction within India and within the Indian queer movement in particular,
but Indian progressive movements at large. This builds upon my own position.
So as the dominant caste in the Indian working as a cisgender queer man, I am both the perpetrator of this,
but also the exact kind of person who does discourses produced by and produced for.
So in many ways, this is something that I've grappled as as something that I have almost been expected to reiterate and then.
I've taken the time to unpack it, working upon my experiences within queer activism in India and then my work in Kashmir.
So the broad theoretical framework that I'll be working here will be with Just Be.
It was common nationalism. It'll be sort of seeing how nationalism has evolved or rather morphed from its initial sort of disdain for LGBTQ rights
into a more sort of generative acceptance for LGBTQ rights in a very limited way and its subsequent weaponization.
I'll also be sort of touching upon what done it on Hindu nationalism,
but people like the chant about the iron ore ships that got some very important work done by Natasha Coleman that could be on
the sort of construction of history and it's gendered imaginary within the Indian imagination on we're not done by moon upon
a CIA and some not so much on welfare to welfare and the sort of narrative that's changing and particularly now and then a
little bit by the whole downstream issue about what it means to sort of oppose this within an Indian constitutional framework.
I think before I begin, we have to acknowledge that this is the unprecedented moment of sort of state subjugation industry.
Several writers, journalists, academics are in jail most often under acts like the Public Safety Act or the EPA, which are non-bailable.
There has been a clampdown on freedom of speech and there have also been heightened instances of atrocities
after the abrogation of Article 370 and the lockdown and complete communications blockade that followed.
So I think this is also a moment that's theorised by a lot of people as a transition of the Indian
states presence in fishmeal from being that of a colonial power to a settler colonial power.
And I'll touch upon by the sort of language of LGBTQ rights is particularly relevant in that transition.
So I'm going to start off with the stories that have already set the sort of theoretical framework,
and the story sort of begins in 2013, in December 2020.
In December 2013, you had the BJP.
Rising its phenomenal ascendance under the stewardship stewardship of Narendra modi,
who then prime ministerial candidate and its sort of position within the Indian election campaign as frontrunner
and widely touted as succeeding the Indian National Congress as the sort of next party to govern the country.
The BJP has historically maintained its stance,
have been smeared as one of opposing any form of autonomy and supporting complete forms of integration of meat into the Indian Union.
That has there had been, at least for a while before the sort of arrival of Modi and the pre-eminence of Kashmir on the national stage.
Once again, under Hindu nationalism, a sort of quiet and rhetoric around Article 70 that had presumed that Article G 70 would stay as is,
where very few had thought it possible that Article G 70 could ever be removed.
So the first thing that happens is, in the first week of December 2013, the Indian modi leads the first election rally in Kashmir by the BJP in Jammu.
This is the little car rally. It's the biggest rally that the parties held in Kashmir in the in recent history.
And it sets the tone for the BJP's policy and how this meeting will feature in the national conversation around the national elections,
which are to be held just six months later in May 2014.
So December 2013, at the local rally, Narendra modi makes a provocative speech in which he questions the need to continue with Article 70.
Now, Article 37 is the provision that grants autonomy to Kashmir under this other instrument of decision signed by the then maharajah of Kashmir,
Hari Singh, with the Indian state.
That essentially provides for a greater degree of autonomy to army of then then granted to any other state in the Indian Union,
and also sets the dawn for a sort of transition into independence after the holding of a plebiscite in the region.
And so Article G 70 is incredibly important to Kashmir, primarily because it gives the region autonomy and protects that sort of special status,
but also it prevents people from buying land in the region,
therefore preventing a settler colonial project and from voting in the region,
therefore allowing for a degree of democratic participation that cannot be influenced by India, which is much larger, both in size and in population.
So Modi sets the stone and makes the provocative claim as to why do we need Article 70 anymore?
And it makes national headlines that evening on Arnab Goswami NewsHour,
which is the most watched English news television debate over the course of the election campaign.
The topic of discussion is Article 70, with multiple panellists coming in,
weighing in and sort of building this narrative for the eventual abrogation of Article 70 and
for the need to subsume Kashmir within the Indian Union under a very strong national structure.
Just ten days later, on the 11th of December 2013, the Supreme Court of India.
In a landmark shocking verdict overturns the Delhi High Court verdict passed not too long ago,
which puts the very controversial laws Section three, seven seven back on Indian Statute books.
Now, Section 377 is India's anti-sodomy law.
It was introduced in the 1860s under British imperialism to criminalise sodomy and has over the years been used
to specifically target the LGBTQ community as it prohibits carnal intercourse against the order of nature.
So this became, again, an incredibly large event, right?
And it led to the politicisation of LGBTQ rights.
Right at the heart of an election campaign. Never before had you seen LGBTQ rights being discussed in the political sphere in such a fervent manner.
And it's such scale because the Delhi High Court in 2009 had already struck down Section three, seven, seven, calling it unconstitutional.
You'd seen a flowering of the LGBTQ rights movement in India.
You'd seen people come out. You'd seen sort of corporate participation,
also sort of legal action being taken that allowed for a certain set of rights to be granted to LGBTQ persons,
and a lot more visibility for LGBTQ persons in general on the national stage.
All of this visibility coalesced in protest against Section three, seven, seven.
There was a global day of outrage. It became an international issue.
There were various ways in which the queer issue, and specifically the Supreme Court's verdict on Section three,
seven, seven became a rallying cry for the community to demand better from politicians.
This became a moment when Indian queer started asking politicians, What is your stance on LGBTQ rights?
That night, on a number of Sundays news hour, the topic of discussion was Section 37 seven.
Now, Section 377, Article 37 does sound very similar to each other, and that evening were confused for each other.
Several times over the next few months, the Duke provision started getting confused so often by politicians,
by LGBTQ rights activists, like a lot of activists, and by everyone involved, that it almost led to some comical situations.
In fact, a satire news article put out a piece that said a BJP spokesperson was defending Section 37 D of the removal of Section 317.
I got some news, but ended up demanding the removal of section 377, instead prompting a question Does the BJP now support LGBTQ rights?
And so amidst this confusion, amidst these sort of conversations around Section 77 and Article 70, a whole array of new provisions were born.
So online you could find Article 377, Section 371.
Was it the Indian Constitution? One was the Indian penal code.
People are mixing up one for the other, resulting in a sort of discussion of the two legislations, and then by extension,
a discussion of queerness and Kashmir in the same breath, which simply had never happened before.
At this moment you saw the politicisation of LGBTQ rights take a peculiar to the Indian National Congress under the precedent of Sonia Gandhi.
It is an unprecedented statement that came out against the Supreme Court verdict and in favour of LGBTQ rights.
This was the first time that a national political party had taken a stance on the issue,
and it led to a lot of liberal sort of support for the Congress's position and more importantly,
a lot of liberal outrage as to why the BJP had been silent on the issue and in fact, why its own leaders, several of them,
had made statements explicitly supporting the Supreme Court's verdict and coming out with sort of homophobic remarks.
Amidst this, there was a lot of online conversation generated around these two provisions,
and the general nature of conversation around these provisions when they were connected to each other was something along these lines.
You had progressive individuals who are calling upon the BJP to take a stance on LGBTQ issues,
appealing to moderate leaders in the BJP and calling by the Prime Minister himself,
the prime minister candidate, then himself, to make a statement on LGBTQ rights.
In response, you had trolls and the sort of right wing activist and right wing commentators primarily made up of online,
predominantly middle class, upper caste men, responding with, Why do you care about Section 377 when you should be getting about national security?
So in many ways, Section 377 and Article G 70 were pitted against each other.
And apart from the confusion, you saw the emergence of a narrative that said that national security was more important than
LGBTQ rights and that all those arguing for LGBTQ rights were arguing against national security,
against India's interests, effectively saying all LGBTQ black activists or those supporting LGBTQ rights were anti-national.
That's been turned around more often than we'd like in the present day and age.
So this was very classic, and it just resembled the standard definitions of Hindutva that we've come to sort of engage with over the years.
Bala Chadha, in your remarkable work, has shown how internationalism has systematically excluded quilts,
and it manages to be sort of presenting masculinity as this desired idea and queerness as one of its fundamental threats.
So tracing the evolution of internationalism, she, she's shown through publications by the RSS and by other sort of ideological
armies of Hindu nationalism that actually queerness is systematically excluded.
And, in fact. The project off into nationalism is diametrically opposed to the project of cryonics.
And this was what played out in 2013. And this was the sort of debate that took place online, particularly within the Strand.
I was fascinated by The Strand and traced it by collating large amounts of Twitter and
Facebook data and seeing how these two arguments piece together evolved over the years,
particularly with the sort of different social and political context.
Every time you had a court hearing on Section three, seven, seven, an animated discourse around LGBTQ rights,
you saw a similar spike in conversations around Article 317 and the reiteration of this discourse,
which sort of dismissed anyone arguing for LGBTQ rights as somebody who was not in favour of national security.
Things change, of course. 2014 saw the election of Narendra modi as prime minister with people voting majority.
You saw the sort of complete, systematic.
Presence of a Hindu nationalist government in India after almost a decade.
And you saw a sort of changing of narratives around a lot of social issues
because the party that was once in opposition was now in a position of power.
In 2018, there was a major Supreme Court verdict that overturned the 2013.
But in essence, a constitution bench of the Supreme Court of India had decided that its
previous verdict was erroneous and said that Section 377 had to be struck down.
Use the grounds of privacy, to use the grounds of human dignity, and essentially enable LGBTQ rights to be validated through law.
In this context, and this is a moment of great celebration, again, made major headlines.
It was seen as the new Independence Day for LGBTQ blessed Indians.
Mumbai is where Pride Parade was actually called the Queer,
as I imagine a in other strange sort of coalesce its call list nature of Kashmiri sort of resistance, movement, vocabulary and queerness.
And you had this sort of overwhelming joy around this overturning of a colonial era law.
Interestingly, this was a narrative that proved to be quite detrimental in the long run.
Posters, placards and other sorts of forms of protest celebrated this Independence Day as the
overturning of a sort of vestige of British morality and Victorian morality and imperial law.
It positioned India as a safe haven for LGBTQ rights before colonisation,
and built into this narrative that before the British arrived, there was actually a wide degree of respect for queerness within India.
The strap that picked up on this was the Hindu nationalist and most directly an online.
You saw rightwing accounts sort of supporting this verdict, using the language of promotion of Hindu culture,
the tolerance of Hindu culture, and the inherent Hindu nature of India that had allowed for this sort of move to be made possible.
The problem and of course, it only made this India before the British, the Hindu nationalist movement,
took it one step further and said India before the British and the Mughals in a sort of.
Increased all sort of extension of a process that engineering Descartes has very aptly
termed as a form of archival hermeneutics that often leads to counterproductive results.
Right. So in 2018, you see see a sort of shift in the Hindu nationalism narrative that is gradually generally embracing LGBTQ rights within
a language of sort of Hindu how to make inclusion and the sort of essential acceptance of queerness within Hinduism.
And online you see the 37377 connexion new forms being reworked in in very unique and strange ways.
So in 2018, you see the same accounts that had opposed Section 377 overturning in 2013, done to a narrative that says,
well, now that Section 377 is overturned, the Supreme Court should remove Article 370.
And they frame this within a broader language of equality.
In the first instance of the weaponization, of the language of LGBTQ rights, in the context of the state.
So it's said that you remove section three, seven, seven because everybody is equal and everybody should have equal rights, including queer people.
You must now also remove Article 37 to have the same grounds of equality, giving Indians and Kashmiris equal rights.
Because why can't Indians marry Kashmiri Kashmiris right now or become citizens of Ishmael?
Why can't Indians buy land in Kashmir? So this remains a relatively fringe narrative.
It's promoted by a journalist called Article Singh,
who's since gone on to become a prominent right wing spokesperson and testified in the US Congress and his thesis.
You see it also being put forward by rightwing queer people themselves, including those like Abigail Mitra,
who's a sort of commentator and and rightwing queer activist who owns rights and national security.
And you see the sort of mushrooming of this argument that now the three, seven, seven is gone.
The next step needs to be 370. It's also one that, of course, comes from the fact that the BJP government is in power.
It hasn't fulfilled its electoral promise of removing Article 70 yet.
Modi announced way back in 2013 that Article G 70 should go five years down.
Article G 70 has still not gone,
and the right wing is now placing its feet in the courtroom instead of in executive authority for such a transformation to come to fruition.
Also, building upon the ways in which the courtroom has become a sort of pseudo policymaking chamber for the government under
this present government in title disputes like the temple dispute and the sort of resolution of the bar being my ship,
which was done again through the courtroom rather than through the executive,
but in a way that resembled the executive will enforced through the judiciary.
So in 2018, you see, it is now to build out that first three, seven, seven must go and then 370.
And in 2019, the unprecedented the unprecedented happens again,
which is the unilateral revocation of Article 70 by the Indian government in Parliament.
So the BJP, in a surprise move on the 5th of August 2019, evokes Article 37 of the Indian Constitution,
effectively severing Kashmir's autonomous status and degrading the region from an autonomous status to
the title of union territory the region with the least amount of autonomy within the Indian Union.
It also results in the partition of the the sort of erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir
into Jammu and Kashmir as one union territory and the back as another union territory,
sort of also disrupting the geographic boundaries of a disputed region under international law.
This is accompanied by the communications blockade that has been one of the longest
official meetings that was seen in the most brutal and most totalitarian right.
It's accompanied by snapping of phone lines,
all forms of digital communication and a curfew that is enforced through one of the largest military deployments the valley has ever seen.
This goes on for almost six months. That is complete radio silence from what is happening inside Kashmir.
Every single major political leader is placed either under house arrest or put into prison.
Any forms of protests and demonstrations are banned, and India,
on the international scale is facing massive amounts of global outrage around this sort of
unilateral action and a flagrant violation of international law and territorial sovereignty.
Amidst this, you see a sort of Indian state that is emboldened by its sort of second that it's just been
recently elected into and also by its increased economic power that goes on firefighting mode.
So across the country and both domestically and internationally, you see the BJP and the Indian state at large justifying this action in various ways.
So the first one is primarily that Kashmir is an internal issue and that India is free to do what it chooses within its territorial boundaries.
The second is that it is and it is a form of economic emancipation, and that this will actually lead to development in Kashmir,
which is an argument that was used to get Modi elected to power in 2014.
And the third one is and the most nefarious one is that this is actually an it is actually a move that's intended to emancipate ordinary Kashmiris.
Now, this builds upon a narrative that but but it's a desire and something Mushtaq have pointed out earlier of the sort of portrayal
of Kashmir women as oppressed and of Kashmir as being sort of economically underdeveloped because of its autonomous status.
It also builds upon sort of standard tropes of Islamophobia that portray the Muslim woman in India as oppressed,
which has played out in recent debates on the hijab.
And it frames the entire debate in a sort of social emancipation context that sees the Indian state as almost an evangelical,
emancipatory presence in Kashmir. This argument takes three distinct strands.
One is with the rest with respect to the emancipation of women.
And you see a lot of sort of arguments being put forth to the international stage about the emancipation of Kashmiri women.
This is countered by Indian feminist groups as well to some degree, but continues nonetheless within the mainstream discourse.
The second one is a discourse on dust. There's an argument made that because the Street enjoys autonomous status,
oppressed caste do not enjoy the same privileges of reservation and other forms of affirmative
action that they do and constitutional protection that they do within the Indian state,
which they will now enjoy in Kashmir after the abrogation of Article 370.
This is, again, splintering, anti-gas movements within the country.
Many advocates, activists speak out against this form of caste washing and this this justification, which often yields no concrete results.
And the third one, which is which is a fringe one, but yet an important one,
is the justification of the abrogation of Article three seven and the revocation of autonomy as a victory for LGBTQ rights.
The most prominent place in which this appears is in a debate by Jitendra on NDTV against Shashi, the root of the Indian National Congress.
It's targeted for a very domestic, liberal, elite, English speaking audience that the BJP now needs to win favour with internationally.
It finds we again with an article by Japan for the BBC intended to sort of play the
same rules that the US played in many ways in the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq,
and the same sort of human nationalist narrative that's been used in the movement in an immense,
[INAUDIBLE] way to justify occupation in other parts of the world.
And it also finds its presence in people like the overseas wing chief of the BJP, who uses this to justify the abrogation of Article 70 in the US.
And he's actually a series of talks in many cities facilitated by the Indian consulates
and embassies that use this rhetoric to justify the abrogation of Article 370.
Now, this strand is is peculiar because it manages to connect Article 70 and Section 77 in a very directly.
The argument made here is that because India had overturned Section 77 through the Supreme Court judgement in 2018,
that that did not extend to Kashmir in 2018 because of the abrogation of Article 70.
So the abrogation of Article G 70 was necessary to create one nation, one law, one country,
one rule that would allow for the extension of the privileges enjoyed by queer people in India to those enjoyed by queer people,
to those enjoyed by equity beneficiaries of extension of these rights and the sort of direct correlation between Article 70 and Section three,
seven, seven, that it was almost more nefarious than the initial one, which was similar, which was which was just a similar language of equality.
So you see a direct connexion between these things. And this is promoted by some very prominent rightwing political accounts.
It's promoted again by by BJP spokespersons themselves.
And it sees that transformation of what exists is existed as a diffuse discourse of confusion into an organised
sort of discourse of disinformation promulgated by the Indian state in sort of India and internationally.
But I'm just reading now very quickly, this is what would happen has called the transition from welfare to welfare.
So she is just how the development of dams in Kashmir, particularly in Doda and destroyed, has been used as a marker of development,
as the panacea for the political resolution of the conflict, as the Indian state is the promoter of and saw enabler of development in the region.
It also reflects what the shock and awe shot by that family has called for Hindu nationalism and the sort of conditional acceptance
of queerness within Hindu nationalism as long as queer people participate in the political project of internationalism.
Very interestingly, it manages to create a country that is simultaneously queer and queer phobic.
So an analogy I know it could be an annotation. God has spoken about the gendered imaginary of history.
This talking about how bushmeat is feminised because leading men in particular feminised.
And the idea of cashmere, the land of cashmere has applied to feminine lengths.
The Indian imaginary Fabian Hartwell has built upon this to show how extreme masculinity has actually
been created in many ways and takes up the example of behind money in discourse on good money,
which is almost homoerotic in nature. To showcase how the Indian state portrays women as queer.
And then it is countered by this sort of assertion that bushmeat is inherently phobic,
Islam is inherently fear phobic, and that India must emancipate Kashmiris.
And it reflects what just before has sense, almost dialectic, that operates within the nationalism of the queer yet queer phobic.
And it's sort of seeping into the sort of Indian states imagination of Kashmir.
Now. I think this is a particularly important move because it signals an almost ideological shift that is.
Presenting a ideological framework that can accompany the settler colonial process that is currently underway in pursuit.
It allows for the building of a social narrative that can be used to go beyond arguments of only
grabbing land to now include a sort of moralistic imperative that justifies Indian presence in Kashmir.
What then are the alternatives to this? I'm going to turn to this very quickly before taking questions, because I know I've already run.
I've been speaking for a while. So the alternatives to this have been two fold.
The first one has been a direct assertion by several legal scholars, including a former justice of the German dispute,
high court and other sort of legal experts,
including those who actually fought the S.C. 77 case in the Supreme Court, that the BJP's argument is patently false.
The Supreme Court of India has enjoyed jurisdiction in Jammu and Kashmir since 1951.
There has been a sort of dilution of autonomy where before the abrogation of Article 370 and the Jammu and
Kashmir High Court has always had to conform with the sort of decision of the Supreme Court of India,
so long as it relates to an exact provision of Kashmiri law, as is being decided upon in India.
So 1992 case actually makes it abundantly clear that if the Indian state rules on a provision
of the Indian penal code which is replicated or is the same provision in the penal code,
which especially its own penal for granted under autonomy,
then the ruling of the Supreme Court of India will apply to Jammu and Kashmir and cannot be challenged even by the Jammu and Kashmir High Court.
So this is the argument that has been used,
which is to say that the very foundation of the community of the BJP is discourse around greenness in Kashmir,
is false, and that this is a project of disinformation.
It's a narrative that I have argued for at the time in 2019.
It's a narrative that has been built upon by several others who have also pointed out that the BJP's actions in
Kashmir and its presentation of itself as an emancipator for queer people have not been matched by any action.
So in 2018, actually, right before the abrogation of Article 70,
you had a government that was actually a coalition with the BJP in the state and a finance minister from every one of these party introduced
the provision in the Jammu and Kashmir budget after years of activism by the trans community and the queer community in Kashmir,
which classified trans persons as economically weaker sections and in a landmark decision unlike anything seen in the subcontinent, actually,
except potentially for certain provisions made by individual provinces of the budget in Pakistan,
allowed for subsidies to be granted to trans persons and special sort of allowances to also be made in this case.
The BJP, after imposing precedents rule on Kashmir, which continues after today, has failed to implement that provision,
has failed to also carry forward that budget, and has shown that the sort of commitment or the lip service to LGBTQ rights extends only peripherally.
This is also been the argument, interestingly extended when a group of protesters disrupted an event at Suez in 2019,
which was led by Kashmiri activists and which saw disruption by masked people who entered the event with a rainbow flag.
That said, Article 70 is so Islamophobic and argued that anyone arguing against Article 70 was actually being homophobic.
There's an international argument that has been developed in response to arguments against the abrogation of Article de 70.
That has been countered by saying that, well,
you didn't do much for the queer community after you came into power, and neither does your sort of argument.
Hold on. On legal, factual drones. Very interestingly, the real job has pointed out in a separate piece on the the Citizenship Amendment Act.
How such a narrative done to constitutionalism and the law,
particularly towards any framework that showcases the Indian state's inherent sort of gentility of benevolence in Kashmir has a darker side.
He speaks about what and he speaks about how the Indian Constitution became the rallying cry for
Indian Muslims and sort of Indian Dalits and other allied marginalised communities at large.
During the Citizenship Amendment Act protest and how the upholding of that constitution means
so little in Kashmir region that has been fighting to free itself from that very constitution.
So what can a constitution mean to those who don't wish to be governed by justice?
Beautiful line that he writes in philosophy. Now, philosophy, I think that encapsulates what such an argumentation does.
And she may. Gosh, building upon that further demonstrates how the very opposition to this argument is perniciously
tied into a form of formal nationalism that implicates itself in the gradual erosion of autonomy.
Because the only reason the BJP's argument does not hold water is that governments before the BJP,
non Hindu nationalist governments actually had put in place provisions that removed
Kashmiri autonomy bit by bit over the years in the project of the Indian state,
that has been the steady deprecation of and steady assimilation of Kashmir into the Union of India.
And so it requires then a turning back and asking, what does this opposition to human nationalism entail?
How we got in a sort of process of forming nationalism in opposing this?
And then what does the sort of ethical opposition to this argument look like
and what frameworks can to dig in a far more critical sense of interrogation
that demonstrates the complexity of dealing with forms of lawfare that have been deployed by the BJP's ideological opponents in the region.
So it's almost like between the devil and the deep blue sea.
No argument really works here as some form of creative engagement to counter the discourse produce.
So all in all, three very disturbing, disturbing developments that are happening that we aim to I hope to counter and I love love feedbacks.
One is the sort of transformation of Indian nationalism and its attitude towards queerness from being inherently sort
of excluding queers to now selectively assimilating queers as long as they participate in the Indian Queer Project.
The second is the sort of transformation of queerness and its sort of encapsulation within Homo national politics that's required to find
effective ways of building solidarity and retaining forms of support for folks immediate enemy and genuine sort of intersectional solidarity.
And the third is the situation of Kashmir as not.
Just the site off, but also the production of discourses of formal nationalism in India in very unique ways.
And just to shed light a little bit on this, it's interesting that the Indian state has never before used this argument.
For example, in Nagaland. It's never used this argument in bluster or within sort of Marxist strongholds.
This argument has been uniquely used in Kashmir that reflects its sort of entanglements with homophobia,
but also its wider implications for the sort of Indian states and Hindu nationalisms engagement with queerness in India as a whole.
And as we move forward, I think it's going to be important to do engage with this discourse primarily to see is to build intersectional
solidarity and to also then understand ways in which this discourse can be found in effective ways.
And with that, I think I have spoken enough. I will leave the floor open to questions, comments, discussions and anything of the sort.