A violent police raid could signal things to come with the law criminalizing homosexuality back in effect.
BANGALORE, India — In a sweep that lasted through the first night of India's biggest celebration, Diwali, police in November arrested 13 people for homosexuality in the town of Hassan, about a three hours' drive from India's tech hub of Bangalore. At the police station, some of those arrested say they were asked if they were really men, whether they liked getting fucked in the ass, and if they had pimped out their wives to get them pregnant. At least two were stripped, beaten, and threatened with having a nightstick shoved up their rectum.
The next day, their names were splashed across the pages of local newspapers under lurid headlines. Some lost their jobs.
At first, the arrests appeared to be an example of police lawlessness, and LGBT activists from Bangalore rushed in to investigate. The cops had charged the men under Section 377, a colonial-era law criminalizing "sex against the order of nature," including same-sex intercourse. But the law was unenforceable at the time of their arrest — at least in cases of consensual intercourse — because it had been suspended under a 2009 ruling of the Delhi High Court as an unconstitutional violation of LGBT people's rights.
Now the situation is different. Just over a month after the arrests, India's Supreme Court reinstated Section 377. To activists, that cast the raids in a whole new light. Many LGBT people had decided to come out in the four and a half years since the law was suspended, believing the threat of arrest or prosecution was over. Now, as the men in Hassan wait for formal charges to be presented to the court, there is increasing concern that their situation could be a sign of how easily LGBT people's lives could be destroyed now that the law is back on the books.
This is the story of the police sweep, based on interviews with four of the 13 people arrested that night, as well as a fifth person whose accusations prompted the raids. The accuser and three of the accused spoke with BuzzFeed by phone with the help of an interpreter translating from Kannada or Hindi. The fourth accused man answered questions by email in English.
BuzzFeed also reviewed police documents provided by LGBT activists and translated from Kannada. Several calls to the cell phone of the police officer who oversaw the raids, Superintendent Ravi Channannavar, went unanswered, and he did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.
Nov. 3 was the first night of Diwali, the most important festival in the Hindu calendar, and most Indians were lighting candles, setting off fireworks, and exchanging gifts. Late that night, a 21-year-old college student identified in court papers as "Puttaraju, son of Thippeswamy," walked into the Hassan police station to make a complaint.
According to police records, Puttaraju alleged that three employees of a government-funded HIV program called the Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement had forced him into sex work more than two years before, in August 2011. He asked police to arrest them, plus two men he said the HIV workers had forced him to service. He also named a sixth person who he said "forcefully had unnatural sex with me against my will" without the involvement of the HIV workers.
The police appear to have taken his statement twice, producing a handwritten First Information Report (FIR), which is time-stamped 10 p.m., and a second, typed version, which he signed at 12:10 a.m. on Nov. 4. The police recorded that he had waited so long to come forward because he "was not sure and was under tremendous pressure and fear," but now had "gathered strength to complain against all of them."
The accusations came as a shock to the HIV workers, some of whom said they were "quite close" with Puttaraju. He had been a client at the Youth Movement, and they'd helped him get tested and access anti-retroviral therapy when he was found to be HIV positive. They had given him some money for food since he was constantly short of cash.
In an interview, Puttaraju said he finally came forward in part because he was angry that those he accused had not done enough to help him pay for his tuition and medication. "I used to ask for support with my education and health status, [but] nobody has helped me so far," he said. He also suggested that he was also doing the sex work he claimed he'd been forced into in order to cover his bills. "I could have stopped all this, but I needed money," Puttaraju said.
The night of Diwali, the police filed two other complaints. One said they had caught three men "indulging in unnatural sex" and "inviting people to have unnatural sex with them in public" in the town's Maharaja Park between 9 and 10 p.m., at the same time that Puttaraju was making his complaint. The second said police had caught five others "indulging in similar activities" on the grounds of a local high school during the same time period.
Puttaraju's problematic complaint, and the simultaneous arrests of the other men, has raised a host of questions among LGBT activists, who believe it was a premeditated scheme by police to target the town's LGBT community. At least one of the men allegedly busted while having public sex was actually dragged out of his home five hours later, witnesses to his arrest said. And it is unclear whether the police actually caught anyone having public sex.