Anish Gawande, NCP (SP)’s national spokesperson and one of India’s few openly gay politicians, is candid about the tension at the heart of his public life. 

“The constant crisis that any gay politician faces is how gay are you and how politician are you – as if those are like very separate entities,” he says. 

As a gay politician, Gawande admits that he is always second-guessing himself. “Am I talking about gay rights too much? Am I not talking about other issues enough? It is a really weird thing to confront. What a messed up choice to make.” 

But the calculus is deliberate. Gawande believes that if he did not speak about the Ranveer Allahbadia controversy, Pahalgam, the trade war with the US, or other issues, his words against the Trans Act would not have reached as many people. “If I'm speaking to an echo chamber that is already sensitised to an issue, what is my value add in politics?”

On why queer people don’t constitute a vote bank, he is matter-of-fact: “Queer people don't vote as a block – queer people are also Dalit, also Muslim, also Adivasi.” But he is equally clear that this is no reason for parties to disengage. 

The conversation gets more complicated when Gawande turns to the question of queerness and Hindutva. He refuses easy answers. “There is a valid argument to be made that proximity to Hindutva has a lot more to offer queerness today than a complete opposition to Hindutva” – but he doesn’t endorse it.

His own long-term bet is on building coalitions. “When queer rights are clubbed with Dalit rights, with disability rights, with the fight against Islamophobia, with the housing crisis – that becomes an interest group that’s impossible to ignore.”

On the Cockroach Janta Party and its spokesperson’s charge that queer rights are an ‘elite’ concern, he invokes the march in the 1990s that Namdeo Dhasal of the Dalit Panthers led with sex workers and trans sex workers from Kamathipura to then chief minister Sharad Pawar’s residence to demand protection from money lenders. “Queer issues are also class issues,” he says, and the perception of queerness as elite is not rooted in reality.

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