View from the Margins: How the Modi government failed India’s transgender community

Voting is often the only chance that many of India's marginalised groups get to express themselves. As national elections approach, Scroll's reporters fanned out across the country to talk to groups with little socio-political power as part of a series called the View from the Margins. The aim: try to understand how the powerless and the voiceless have fared under a decade of the Modi government.

Earlier this month, Raghavi took leave from her job as a lawyer in Delhi to go to vote in her hometown of Kanpur on May 13. As a transgender woman, she wanted to demonstrate her displeasure with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

“The BJP government has failed and continues to fail the transgender community,” said Raghavi,

This contradicts Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim in February that his government had benefitted the community by enacting the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, under which community members were given identity cards.

‘Toothless Act’

The Act was supposed to be the culmination of the process for the transgender community to be affirmed as equal Indian citizens that had begun with a landmark court verdict a month before Modi became prime minister. In April 2014, the Supreme Court had delivered its NALSA judgment in response to a public interest litigation filed by the National Legal...

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