MajaDaruwala

Eat before boarding.

Yes I do. Culturally there is a lot of tolerance of the live and let live type. At the same time family rejection etc has caused them to create a culture which is self exclusionary but gives protection where there is none. I think as the country progresses in terms of civil liberties and issues of equality and discrimination so will the lot of hijras.

What you speak of is one of the manifestations of a very complex set of social economic and political circumstances. As an organisation CHRI works on changing systems and through that improving the situations you speak of. Its a longer agenda but if one thing changes a lot of knock on effects take place. Presently we are looking at women in policing and are preparing ourselves to work on police response to women's complaints.

You deserve human rights because you are human. Actually it is not always a happy circumstance to be defending unpopular causes or people; but that is the whole point of human rights; they are for just those kinds of moments. One of the best things that happened in India has been the trial of Mr Kasab. He could only be punished after he was properly and fairly tried. This was not only for him. But an assurance to each of us that justice is best served when it is even handed and applies to all. All people are given equal treatment before the law; there is due process and you are punished accordingly or let off. It is not a perfect system but it is the best we have. The alternative is arbitrariness, accusations by the powerful that become irresistible whether true or false, oppression of the weak, no access to justice and an easy ride for abuse of power.

In our part of the world as with many developing countries the issue is of unreformed policing. Policing that was developed to control a foreign and subject population by rulers who needed law and order to prevail rather than the rule of law. At independence there should have been a full reconsideration of what kind of police we needed and wanted to follow our constitutional provisions. This did not happen. So the whole design and ethos is wrong. Then you have the issue of overlays of abuse of power, illegitimate, political interference in management and day to day functioning, and even in investigational outcomes. Then there is the shortages of training and infrastructure manpower and worst of all(or as a consequence of all the above) lack of accountability for both wrong doing and every day performance.