My first vote: ‘Don’t care who wins, want to be counted as a citizen’
Reshmi Biswas, a transgender activist, overcomes bias and hurdles to vote for the first time in the Indian general elections, aiming to affirm her right as a citizen.
Next to a whitewashed lilac wall, Reshmi Biswas is hard at work. The crackle of sizzling oil in a large pan of frying fish is wafting into the cubbyhole where the 23-year-old sits, a jumble of mouldy files in front of her and a stack of discount mattresses behind. In that cramped room, she is one of four people behind a desk, the tables arranged diagonally to make the most of the precious real estate.
Evening is falling outside the three-room office that Biswas shares with 10 other staffers of the non-governmental organisation’s office in eastern Kolkata. The cacophony of e-rickshaw horns and auto drivers arguing raucous alerts her to the late hour. There is still one bulging file left to process, then a sweaty bus ride to Sealdah station and a two-hour train journey to her home in Nadia district’s Kalyani town. It’s a sapping routine that recurs every day, but Biswas has no complaints. “If this is the only way I can work for people like me, so be it,” she says.
A history graduate, Biswas works with a NGO that helps transgender people with survival, safety and livelihood. Work days can stretch beyond 12 hours and emergencies lurk around the corner (the mattresses behind her are meant to house trans people suddenly rendered homeless by hostile relatives). It’s a draining schedule that leaves Biswas time for very little else.
But this week is special. She has spent countless hours poring over her voter identity card and supporting documents. At the end of the week is her ultimate test – voting for the first time in an election, a privilege that most of her fellow Indians take for granted but one that has been denied to her twice before due to trivialities and bias. “More than anything else, it’ll affirm my right as a full citizen. I cannot wait,” she says.
Biswas is part of a cohort of 18 million people who will exercise their franchise for the first time in the ongoing general elections, their aspirations and concerns shaping the battle for the 18th Lok Sabha. But for her, the privilege is even more special, given the bitterness that transpeople such as her battle, not just on the streets or in drawing rooms, but also in polling booths.
2
Growing up in a two-bedroom middle-class dwelling with two siblings, Biswas’s problems with bias began early. In her co-ed school, young boys didn’t take kindly to her mannerisms and gait, needling her for having more female friends than male. Trips to the washroom were imbued with fear as classmates would hurl expletives. “They would climb over the partition and scream, show us what you have. I could neither tell the teachers because they’d laugh, nor understand why it was happening,” she says.
Her only friend through this ordeal, an effeminate boy she remembers with shaggy hair and shiny bracelets,dropped out of school before the Class 10 board exams. “He couldn’t take the name calling and abuse anymore, but I knew that education was important for me,” she says.
Biswas enrolled in a local college and graduated with an honours degree in history. Straight out of college, she landed a job in a private company – a rarity among her peers in small-town Bengal. “I was very proud,” she says.
Aware that her gender expression could complicate her standing at the workplace, Biswas took pains to appear plain. She eschewed make-up, lipstick and doing up her nails. But every time she picked up the phone – the company employed telecallers who offered loans or marketed products the firm worked on – her voice betrayed her. “I could hear whispers behind and people trying to suppress laughter. Things came to a head one day when the manager humiliated me for my clothes, calling me ‘ladies’ and ‘homo’,”she says. She never went back.
In a society where transpeople are often stereotyped as beggars and vilified as abductors, jobs were difficult to come by. Biswas spent two pandemic-struck years watching her friends from the community sink deeper into financial ruin and emotional turmoil. Many turned to sex work, and yet others to ritual dancing at events in the hinterland – a risky and dangerous profession that forced community members to often experience sexual assault and violence because their paymasters were the perpetrators. A night’s performance would typically last five hours, and earn the troupe ₹3,000. “And for that, we had to fend off village chiefs, and men from the village pawing at us or worse. I survived because of my luck. Others weren’t as lucky.” she says.
3
The Election Commission first allowed transgender people to vote in 1994 following a petition by transgender activist Shabnam Mausi. Three decades later, Biswas found out that the process was just as uphill. She wanted to vote last year in local body polls but her dead-name (the name she was given by her parents at birth) posed a problem. Biswas spent weeks making the rounds of local government and party offices, imploring them to help her change her documents to the correct gender and name. “But all I got were jokes and people throwing slurs at me. Some even didn’t let me enter the premises,” she says.
Denied a first time, she steeled herself ahead of the general elections. She ignored the jibes about her long hair and changes in her face, diligently checking every box in a long to-do list to vote as a transgender person. “I tried everything, from flirting with the officer to shouting at them and finally bribing them. I couldn’t let anything stop me,” she says.
She is lucky; most transpeople cannot change their documents because their ties to the natal family that holds their documentation has snapped. And landmark steps such as the Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in Nalsa vs Union of India that affirmed transgender rights, or the 2019 transgender rights act come up short against inimical social attitudes. “What can you do when officials laugh at you and say, weren’t you a boy before?” she asks.
The run-up to the 2024 general elections saw almost every party make promises to advance transgender rights. But Biswas is certain that her vote will be for a candidate who is focussed on the small things – ensuring a transgender certificate, building toilets that transpersons can use safely, and working out a system that allows them to access health care not as male or female, but as full transgender citizens. “I could have a PhD but they’d still call me slurs. Whether it be police or doctors, we have to change their behaviour,” she says.
The traffic outside the office is thinning now as night gathers around her. Biswas has to scram otherwise she’ll miss the last train to Kalyani – it’s the part of the commute she looks forward to the most because it affords her the chance to catch up on a daily quota of Hindi songs and some sleep. But she is mindful to gently gather her identity documents and voter card, and put them in a special compartment of her bag before heading out. “I don’t care what party comes, but I want to be counted as an Indian citizen,” she says as she runs behind an auto to take her to the railway station. “No one else will understand what it will mean for me to vote. Because they can.”