Nepal was recently witness to a victory of sorts for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and inter-sex (LGBTI) communities. It was an undeniably historic day on 21 December 2007, when the Supreme Court of Nepal, in response to a petition filed by a coalition of local LGBTI-rights groups, ordered the government to fulfil its contractual responsibility to LGBTI individuals by amending existing legislation or formulate new laws that would permit this community to better exercise its civil and human rights.
This was certainly an atypical victory for Nepal's LGBTI movement. In the aftermath, questions are now surfacing about how ideas and identities travel across the transnational landscape, and what social contexts make these transmissions more successful in certain places and times. These questions are especially pertinent when compared to neighbouring India, the imagined custodian of Southasian democracy. Despite having sustained a movement for a longer period, India's gay activists have failed even in their attempts to extricate homosexuality from the general scope of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalises all "carnal intercourses against the order of nature."
Nepal's Civic Code, which dates back to 1854, has undergone major reconstructions. But it nonetheless showed an odd lack of imagination when it came to homosexuality, and the chapter on bestiality that criminalised "unnatural sex" remained unchanged throughout. The use of this statute, much like Sec 377, is in fact very sporadic, absent even in the long history of Nepali jurisprudence. Since its inception in 2001, the Blue Diamond Society, Nepal's leading LGBTI advocacy group, has thus engaged in a series of tussles with the Supreme Court, documenting harrowing cases of abuses, police brutality and arbitrary arrests, and has made 'inclusion' and 'recognition' its rallying calls.
The Supreme Court's ostensibly pro-LGBTI stance is the latest in a spate of progressive rulings that have come about in recent times in Nepal. Following the People's Movement of April 2006, a cacophony of voices has saturated the country's political climate, which has succeeded in making discourses on equality, plurality and identity ubiquitous in the public sphere. In this context, emerging issues have also manifested in non-partisan ways, sometimes circumventing party politics altogether.