K. Sujatha Rao has served as the secretary, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and director general of the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO).
In 1998, the Ashoka Hotel had let out its convention hall for a gathering. When it realised it was for a meeting of LGBTQ people, the hotel cancelled the booking.
The LGBTQ community, I was told, had to then go to the nearby Nehru Park to hold their meeting.
This story was recounted to me, ten years later at a large and well attended conference held in the very same Ashoka Hotel on issues related to gay men and men who have sex with men (known as ‘MSM’ for short).
It was around the same time that Anjali Gopalan, the original petitioner for scrapping Article 377, had got back from the US with a program for working with MSMs and was turned away from India’s National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO).
A year before the high court judgement, in 2008, NACO got a thirty million dollar grant for MSM interventions from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
And then in 2009, the Delhi high court, in a remarkable judgement, declared the Section 377 of the IPC, which criminalises “unnatural sex” and disproportionately affects LGBTQ identifying people, as being contrary to the fundamental rights guaranteed to every Indian citizen and held it unconstitutional. Read more via the Wire
Clearly, within just that decade, centuries of blind prejudice and hatred against an estimated million people having a different sexual orientation was witnessing radical changes.
Such shifts, however, were not due to a sudden change of heart or mind of some individuals. It was the result of a hard, deliberate and targeted effort put in by the LGBTQ community’s activism, several developmental agencies and partners, the political leadership, NACO, media and the judiciary. Change comes in the right environment and these catalysts of change brought about that environment.
The fact that MSMs were very highly vulnerable to HIV infection was known to the government since mid-80s, when the first steps of setting up a system of surveillance was established. That nothing significant was done about it for two decades was due to the hostile social environment, the absence of civil society or agencies to work on the issue as they too were products of the same society and the lack of capacity in NACO to take the lead.
And so when Anjali Gopalan and the Naz Foundation came to help, NACO did not know how to respond.