Anish Gawande: “Hope comes from knowing that our fight was never short or easy to begin with”

To be queer in India is to ride a roller-coaster of acceptance and rejection in an endless loop. On May 31, you could be targeted for your gender identity, and on June 1, every corporation will change their logo to the rainbow flag. So much of it can seem too tokenistic. But when has quitting ever been an option? For as long as it has existed, the queer community has had to wake up every day and brave the odds. Anish Gawande, the first openly gay man to be appointed as a national spokesperson of a majority political party in India, confesses that he doesn’t have the option of cancelling people just because they are homophobic. As a man of the people, he must face the bigots and have a dialogue, yet keep them from bringing him down. Then, he must do it all over again the next day.

Like Gawande, Radhikaraje Gaekwad, the titular maharani of Baroda and the founder of Gazra, Gujarat’s first cafe run by LGBTQIA+ people, upholds centuries of royal tradition while sailing against the current. Over a two-hour conversation, Gawande and Gaekwad find that they are, in different ways, doing the same work: carrying queer conversations into rooms not built to hold them.

Vogue India: Inclusion has become a buzzword rather than a call for meaningful action. What has been your approach to it?

Radhikaraje Gaekwad: My first learning came while running Shri Maharani Chimnabai Stree Udyogalaya, a vocational training centre and one of the earliest women’s self-governing organisations, founded in 1914. It was very frustrating because I’d start something, trans people would come for a few days, then drop out. I finally had to say, “Alright, I’m opening my regular classes to you, and if you wish to join in any form, we support that.” That’s when they started coming in—as teachers and administrative staff. If I had tried to create a classroom or space entirely for them, I would only have segregated them further.

Anish Gawande: There are moments when you’re faced with overt homophobia, which is driven partly by ignorance but also by condescension. Those, you have to brush off. But at other times, it can be such a wonderful way to start conversations. Understanding that people are at different stages of comprehension is very important. If somebody doesn’t have the privilege of knowing the correct vocabulary or terms, chiding or berating them for not knowing better is not a useful way forward. It might just make them more resistant to learning and being better.

Radhikaraje Gaekwad: I have seen people change. When I first started Gazra in August 2023, we had to do the FSSAI-mandated medical test for everyone. Two people tested positive for HIV. I didn’t know what to do because they were in the kitchen. I told them not to come to work for two days while I figured out how to take them out of the kitchen and employ them elsewhere. Later, the kitchen staff—a mix of cisgender and LGBTQIA+ people—came to me and said, “We want to work with them. We have no problem. Just give us the tools to make sure we are safe.” That kind of compassion and humanity can be tapped if you bring trans people into neutral spaces where everyone is equal.

Vogue India: Has there been an evolution in our understanding and acceptance of queerness?

Anish Gawande: The vocabulary for acceptance that we’ve developed is a Western one, which is not a bad thing. Some people identify as gay. That’s an English word. I would not identify as kothi (a biological male who exhibits feminine traits), and that’s fine. But the pushback against acceptance is also taking on a very Western shape. People are watching Andrew Tate and all sorts of ridiculous content online, and saying trans people don’t exist, when 15 years ago, however transphobic you might have been, you would have never said trans people didn’t exist, because you would have seen them around you since you were a child. Whether you were discriminatory towards them is a different question. But saying they don’t exist at all is a new regression.

Vogue India: I’m curious about this resistance because both of you occupy spaces where, traditionally speaking, queerness in any form wasn’t let in. Do you think the odds are stacked against you even now?

Radhikaraje Gaekwad: A few years ago, I wanted to put on a fashion show with the trans community in Ahmedabad. It was the first time for us in the palace, and the trans people were wearing saris made by us. I was inside a five-star hotel organising the makeup and clothes, feeling really happy with myself that we were doing something this amazing. The trans people called me from the gate because the hotel authorities weren’t letting the van carrying them through. When you ally yourself with them, you realise the pushback we face is just a deflection, but it’s what they face every single day.

Anish Gawande: When I was appointed the national spokesperson of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar faction) two years ago, I didn’t realise it made me the country’s first openly gay national spokesperson. The news made headlines. Later, a senior party functionary told me to tone down what I said on LGBTQIA+ rights, and I told him that wasn’t his place to decide. So, it is something I live with constantly. If I’m out, I’m always calculating how much to talk about queer issues, because if that’s all I talk about, my voice gets reduced to only being the ‘gay’ ­ politician. I have to talk about other sociocultural issues, demonetisation, the Ranveer Allahbadia con­troversy and current events. It’s a balancing act. But when someone tells you to tone it down assertively, it creates a visceral unease that is hard to manage.

Vogue India: Radhika, what was the environment at Lukshmi Vilas Palace like when the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026—which essentially walks back the 2019 act recognising self-­perceived identity—was passed?

Radhikaraje Gaekwad: I remember we were assisting someone with gender-affirmation surgery. The 2026 Act shook her so badly that she stopped taking her hormones for the surgery. She didn’t want to go ahead with the surgery anymore because she felt like there was no hope. She thought she might do something illegal by showing up at the doctor’s door or buying medicines for hormone therapy. The dissemination of information to the different levels of society is so warped that the correct information never reaches the people who are affected. We’re trying to create awareness through jan sunwais (public hearings). We counselled her too.

Vogue India: How do we keep up the fight when everything seems to be against us?

Anish Gawande: The push to hope comes from knowing that the fight was never short or easy to begin with. When Dadabhai Naoroji was fighting for independence, he didn’t think he would see it in his lifetime, and he did not. So it is too idealistic to expect that we will see the change we want in the world right now. We’re one small part of the machine. You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions, to quote the Bhagavad Gita.

Radhikaraje Gaekwad: Recently, a high-ranking diplomat from Belgium visited us in Vadodara. He wanted to know about our work here. I sensed that he was from the community, so I asked him about having come out. He said that he has, in Delhi’s diplomatic circles, as part of a robust group of queer community members, but he is still not out to his family. That was such a shock to me. The man is in his 50s. He spoke so proudly about how advanced Belgium is in terms of queer rights, but he hasn’t been able to come out to his own mother. His father passed away. He has had one partner all these years, which also took him a long time to find. So these struggles are global. Judgments like the Trans Act 2026 only make me want to dig my heels in deeper. They remind me how much work still needs to be done, and that just makes me more determined. I believe there is a basic level of goodness in most of us—it’s simply about creating the awareness that taps into that compassion. Once you bring people into the same space as equals, that shift in the human mind is incredible to witness.

This article appears in Vogue India’s September-October 2026 issue. Subscribe here.

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