The collective behind Bengaluru Pride has split into two factions. queerbeat examines the undercurrents that led to the split and what it reveals about the queer movement.
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For nearly a decade, Bengaluru’s Namma Pride has happened in the month of November. This year, the city is set to witness an additional Pride March on 15 June. The date-change isn’t just a logistical detail though—it is the result of long-running conflicts that have splintered Pride organising in Bengaluru into two factions.
This is the story of how that split happened and what it tells us about the queer movement in India.
On 3 June, 2024, a seemingly innocuous email arrived in the inboxes of many of Bengaluru’s prominent queer organisers. It was an invitation to a meeting that would kick off the planning for the city’s annual Pride March—something that most of the recipients had grown accustomed to receiving around that time of the year.
But there was something peculiar about this invite. For the first time, it had come not from the official account of the Coalition for Sex Workers’ and Sexuality Minority Rights (CSMR)—the collective that had co-ordinated the hosting of Bengaluru’s Namma Pride event for over a decade and a half. Instead, the email had been sent from the personal email account of Uma, the founder of Jeeva, a queer rights organisation based in Bengaluru. It was signed by six individuals including Uma, who were all members of CSMR at the time.
The email heralded a storm. Two months and four acrimonious meetings later, it led to a split in CSMR.
By the end of August 2024, a new collective—the Coalition for Sexual, Sexuality Minority, and Sex Workers’ Rights—had been created. The group has since renamed itself the Coalition for Sex Workers', Sexual, and Gender Minority Rights (CSGMR).
CSGMR accuses CSMR of not upholding its founding principles of inclusive, grassroots-led, and transparent community organising. And CSMR accuses CSGMR of being driven by personal interests, claiming its members are seeking political power and public recognition by positioning themselves as the face of the queer community.
Over four months, queerbeat spoke to members of the two factions—those who stayed with the original CSMR and those who left to form CSGMR—to piece together a timeline of events and understand the issues that caused the breakup. We also spoke to other members of the queer community who are familiar with the events that led up to the split and its aftermath.
Many of the people we approached declined to participate in this article. They were concerned about the possibility of the article being used as a platform for mud-slinging and that it may end up taking sides. Hence, it is possible that the article might have missed some perspectives.
Conflicts in queer collectives, like in other community-focused collectives and movements, are not uncommon. Over the years, internal disagreements and disaffection have led to numerous splits and as a result, to a mushrooming in the number of queer organisations in Bengaluru.
However, the split within CSMR has resounded louder than any of those previous splits because it has affected the organising of a highly-visible event—Namma Pride.
In examining the events surrounding this split, the goal of the article is to understand the systemic issues that lead to such splits, the impact they may or may not have on queer communities, and how they affect long-term viability of the queer movement.
In the first decade of the 21st century, queer organising in India was on an upswing. The Naz Foundation, a Delhi-based NGO that works on sexual health issues, was leading the charge against Section 377, the provision that criminalised same-sex sexual activity. There was a sharp influx of international funding for HIV prevention and care among men who have sex with men (MSMs). Queer people were becoming more visible in public spaces. New Delhi, Bengaluru, and Pondicherry, all witnessed their first Pride Marches in the late 2000s. By 2009, the Naz Foundation had won its legal battle against Section 377. It was in this milieu that CSMR was born.
“CSMR was started because queer people were marginalised within existing people’s movements,” said Dilfaraz Jan, a founding member of CSMR who has remained with the collective after the split. “Whether it was a movement space associated with garment workers, labour unions, domestic workers, or religious minorities, within it, there would be limited discussion of queer rights and queer people would be invisibilised.”
The founding principle underlying CSMR was intersectionality, explained Dilfaraz. It aimed to operate as a coalition that would work with the women’s rights, labour rights, religious minority rights, and anti-caste movements that were already established in Bengaluru and across Karnataka. By participating in such movements, CSMR was trying to build solidarity for queer rights.
Since 2008, CSMR has hosted Namma Pride in Bengaluru. Over the past decade, it has taken place in the month of November. The meetings to organise it would typically begin in June. However, in 2024, before CSMR could officially kick off its organising, queer collectives and pride organisers in the city received the email from the group of individuals who would go on to form CSGMR. The email called for a planning meeting to organise Namma Pride .
Mallu Kumbar, a senior member of CSMR, underscores this email (which queerbeat has seen) as the initial point of difference: “Why did they invite us from a personal email and not as CSMR? They said they did not have access to the CSMR email account, but if they had asked us, we would have given access. We know that there was a hidden agenda behind their calling for the meeting.”
Akkai Padmashali, founder of the trans rights NGO Ondede and leader in the State Congress Unit, was one of the co-signers of the email. She told queerbeat that the intention of the email was “misinterpreted” by members of CSMR. “We wanted to talk about how to celebrate Pride in 2024. That was the only reason behind sending the mail. We were not trying to take over Pride as people [from CSMR] have been saying,” Akkai said.
Akkai told queerbeat that she and a few other founding members of CSMR felt that the organisation was straying from its original vision. “Seeing this, we called for a meeting to take Pride back to CSMR’s roots—the intersections with other movements,” she said. “The email was not against the previous organisers of the pride. It was an ideologically motivated point.”
To Akkai, the fact that the email had originated from a personal account was “not a problem.” “Individuals have agency in CSMR. The important thing was to bring in the ideology,” she said. She also told queerbeat that Uma had reached out to the CSMR administration asking for access to the official email account, but it was denied, prompting them to send the email from her personal account. queerbeat wrote to Uma multiple times to follow up on Akkai’s statement, but couldn’t get an interview—she initially said that she was busy and later stopped responding.
For Akkai and some other members of CSGMR, sending the email as individuals was an assertion of them being founding members of both CSMR and Namma Pride. They saw it as their right to reorient Pride in a direction that reflects its original values.
For Mallu and others who remained in CSMR after the split, the invitation for a major collective organisational effort coming from individuals felt like a power-grab. They saw it as an attempt by a few individuals to enrich their personal brands through their association with Pride. Why else were these concerns about the functioning of CSMR not brought up privately, asked Mallu and the other members of CSMR whom queerbeat interviewed.
The meeting called for in the controversial email was ultimately held on June 8, 2024 at the office of Alternative Law Forum, a Bengaluru-based lawyers’ collective associated with social justice work. According to multiple sources from CSMR and CSGMR, the meeting allegedly witnessed chaotic exchanges, verbal insults, threats of violence, and even a physical altercation. Very few decisions about the organising of Namma Pride 2024 were made. Over the following two months, three more meetings were held, during which tensions that had been brewing between CSMR members for years came to the fore.
“Every meeting we fought,” said Syed Ayaan, a current CSMR member and co-founder of Queer Awaam, an NGO working to expand queer people’s access to spaces through awareness campaigns and cultural integration. “The meetings turned into two groups facing off against each other.”
“People came to the meeting with good intentions, but it instead turned into a division between two groups and the power dynamics therein,” said Akkai. “These meetings were not enabling any conversation.”
*****
The original CSMR was no stranger to disagreements prior to this period, but members told queerbeat that they had previously been limited to private, interpersonal conflicts. “Usually, we fight and the next day we come together. From so many years it has been this way in CSMR,” said Sreekanth Kannan, current member of CSMR and the Executive Director of Aneka, a queer support NGO. “This time some fighting happened and a group of people went and started their own coalition.”
On 27 August, 2024, CSGMR announced its separation from CSMR.
In its statement, the breakaway faction stated that its decision to split from CSMR was prompted by “ongoing concerns about the treatment of partnering organisations, the fairness of election processes, the representation of members within working committees, and the management of complaints within CSMR.”
The statement accused CSMR of a lack of operational transparency, including in the management of funds, reluctance to democratise the decision-making process, and aggressive arguments in the face of disagreement.
Last year, with CSGMR announcing its intent to “revitalize and reshape… pride celebrations in Karnataka,” the Bengaluru queer community was abuzz with speculation about the possibility of two Pride marches in November. However, as 24 November, the scheduled date of the CSMR Namma Pride drew nearer, the absence of any further communication from CSGMR about its plans put the rumours to rest.
On 18 November 2024, CSMR released its own public statement on Instagram. It claimed that the decision to form a new organisation, CSGMR, had been taken “without prior discussion with the existing committee or attempts to reconcile differences.” Asserting that CSMR remained committed to an inclusive and united Pride that “values collaboration over division,” it said CSMR was “striving to learn from these events and rebuild our sense of community.”
CSMR published a second statement on 23 November 2024 specifically addressing the allegations made by CSGMR. It contested the allegations of financial mismanagement, affirmed CSMR’s commitment to inclusivity and the safety of everyone attending Pride, and condemned those who were making allegations without offering any evidence. The statement concluded with CSMR expressing hope that Bengaluru’s queer community would shift its focus “from spreading misinformation to the need of the hour: coming together to assert our identities and demand equal rights in a unified voice”.
On the next day, 24 November, the CSMR Namma Pride March went ahead as planned.
However, it was not the only queer event in Bengaluru that day. While the Pride March was underway in central Bengaluru, a protest with the slogan ‘Reclaim Pride’ was also taking place barely a few kilometres away. Organised by the Students for People’s Democracy (SfPD), a Marxist-Leninist students’ collective, the stated aim of the event was to oppose the alleged inclusion of corporates in Namma Pride.
Denzel, an SfPD member, told queerbeat that the protest originated from SfPD’s “discomfort with how corporatised Namma Pride was getting and the lack of financial transparency, particularly with regard to corporate funding.” They said SfPD had objections to the way Namma Pride was being organised even before the split, including concerns around “the lack of diverse voices in the decision making of CSMR.”
Despite the split and the parallel event, CSMR claimed that more people participated in Namma Pride 2024 than ever before. “Every year, around nine thousand people attend. In 2024, eleven thousand people attended the Namma Pride March,” said Dilfaraz of CSMR.
According to Dilfaraz, CSMR calculates attendance numbers based on the number of flags and other paraphernalia that are distributed to attendees. queerbeat is unable to independently verify the claimed numbers.
“This split has clearly not made a difference to the broader community as far as attending Pride is concerned,” Dilfaraz added.
For nearly a decade, Bengaluru’s Namma Pride has happened in the month of November. This year, the city is set to witness an additional Pride March on 15 June. The date-change isn’t just a logistical detail though—it is the result of long-running conflicts that have splintered Pride organising in Bengaluru into two factions.
This is the story of how that split happened and what it tells us about the queer movement in India.
On 3 June, 2024, a seemingly innocuous email arrived in the inboxes of many of Bengaluru’s prominent queer organisers. It was an invitation to a meeting that would kick off the planning for the city’s annual Pride March—something that most of the recipients had grown accustomed to receiving around that time of the year.
But there was something peculiar about this invite. For the first time, it had come not from the official account of the Coalition for Sex Workers’ and Sexuality Minority Rights (CSMR)—the collective that had co-ordinated the hosting of Bengaluru’s Namma Pride event for over a decade and a half. Instead, the email had been sent from the personal email account of Uma, the founder of Jeeva, a queer rights organisation based in Bengaluru. It was signed by six individuals including Uma, who were all members of CSMR at the time.
The email heralded a storm. Two months and four acrimonious meetings later, it led to a split in CSMR.
By the end of August 2024, a new collective—the Coalition for Sexual, Sexuality Minority, and Sex Workers’ Rights—had been created. The group has since renamed itself the Coalition for Sex Workers', Sexual, and Gender Minority Rights (CSGMR).
CSGMR accuses CSMR of not upholding its founding principles of inclusive, grassroots-led, and transparent community organising. And CSMR accuses CSGMR of being driven by personal interests, claiming its members are seeking political power and public recognition by positioning themselves as the face of the queer community.
Over four months, queerbeat spoke to members of the two factions—those who stayed with the original CSMR and those who left to form CSGMR—to piece together a timeline of events and understand the issues that caused the breakup. We also spoke to other members of the queer community who are familiar with the events that led up to the split and its aftermath.
Many of the people we approached declined to participate in this article. They were concerned about the possibility of the article being used as a platform for mud-slinging and that it may end up taking sides. Hence, it is possible that the article might have missed some perspectives.
Conflicts in queer collectives, like in other community-focused collectives and movements, are not uncommon. Over the years, internal disagreements and disaffection have led to numerous splits and as a result, to a mushrooming in the number of queer organisations in Bengaluru.
However, the split within CSMR has resounded louder than any of those previous splits because it has affected the organising of a highly-visible event—Namma Pride.
In examining the events surrounding this split, the goal of the article is to understand the systemic issues that lead to such splits, the impact they may or may not have on queer communities, and how they affect long-term viability of the queer movement.
In the first decade of the 21st century, queer organising in India was on an upswing. The Naz Foundation, a Delhi-based NGO that works on sexual health issues, was leading the charge against Section 377, the provision that criminalised same-sex sexual activity. There was a sharp influx of international funding for HIV prevention and care among men who have sex with men (MSMs). Queer people were becoming more visible in public spaces. New Delhi, Bengaluru, and Pondicherry, all witnessed their first Pride Marches in the late 2000s. By 2009, the Naz Foundation had won its legal battle against Section 377. It was in this milieu that CSMR was born.
“CSMR was started because queer people were marginalised within existing people’s movements,” said Dilfaraz Jan, a founding member of CSMR who has remained with the collective after the split. “Whether it was a movement space associated with garment workers, labour unions, domestic workers, or religious minorities, within it, there would be limited discussion of queer rights and queer people would be invisibilised.”
The founding principle underlying CSMR was intersectionality, explained Dilfaraz. It aimed to operate as a coalition that would work with the women’s rights, labour rights, religious minority rights, and anti-caste movements that were already established in Bengaluru and across Karnataka. By participating in such movements, CSMR was trying to build solidarity for queer rights.
Since 2008, CSMR has hosted Namma Pride in Bengaluru. Over the past decade, it has taken place in the month of November. The meetings to organise it would typically begin in June. However, in 2024, before CSMR could officially kick off its organising, queer collectives and pride organisers in the city received the email from the group of individuals who would go on to form CSGMR. The email called for a planning meeting to organise Namma Pride .
Mallu Kumbar, a senior member of CSMR, underscores this email (which queerbeat has seen) as the initial point of difference: “Why did they invite us from a personal email and not as CSMR? They said they did not have access to the CSMR email account, but if they had asked us, we would have given access. We know that there was a hidden agenda behind their calling for the meeting.”
Akkai Padmashali, founder of the trans rights NGO Ondede and leader in the State Congress Unit, was one of the co-signers of the email. She told queerbeat that the intention of the email was “misinterpreted” by members of CSMR. “We wanted to talk about how to celebrate Pride in 2024. That was the only reason behind sending the mail. We were not trying to take over Pride as people [from CSMR] have been saying,” Akkai said.
Akkai told queerbeat that she and a few other founding members of CSMR felt that the organisation was straying from its original vision. “Seeing this, we called for a meeting to take Pride back to CSMR’s roots—the intersections with other movements,” she said. “The email was not against the previous organisers of the pride. It was an ideologically motivated point.”
To Akkai, the fact that the email had originated from a personal account was “not a problem.” “Individuals have agency in CSMR. The important thing was to bring in the ideology,” she said. She also told queerbeat that Uma had reached out to the CSMR administration asking for access to the official email account, but it was denied, prompting them to send the email from her personal account. queerbeat wrote to Uma multiple times to follow up on Akkai’s statement, but couldn’t get an interview—she initially said that she was busy and later stopped responding.
For Akkai and some other members of CSGMR, sending the email as individuals was an assertion of them being founding members of both CSMR and Namma Pride. They saw it as their right to reorient Pride in a direction that reflects its original values.
For Mallu and others who remained in CSMR after the split, the invitation for a major collective organisational effort coming from individuals felt like a power-grab. They saw it as an attempt by a few individuals to enrich their personal brands through their association with Pride. Why else were these concerns about the functioning of CSMR not brought up privately, asked Mallu and the other members of CSMR whom queerbeat interviewed.
The meeting called for in the controversial email was ultimately held on June 8, 2024 at the office of Alternative Law Forum, a Bengaluru-based lawyers’ collective associated with social justice work. According to multiple sources from CSMR and CSGMR, the meeting allegedly witnessed chaotic exchanges, verbal insults, threats of violence, and even a physical altercation. Very few decisions about the organising of Namma Pride 2024 were made. Over the following two months, three more meetings were held, during which tensions that had been brewing between CSMR members for years came to the fore.
“Every meeting we fought,” said Syed Ayaan, a current CSMR member and co-founder of Queer Awaam, an NGO working to expand queer people’s access to spaces through awareness campaigns and cultural integration. “The meetings turned into two groups facing off against each other.”
“People came to the meeting with good intentions, but it instead turned into a division between two groups and the power dynamics therein,” said Akkai. “These meetings were not enabling any conversation.”
*****
The original CSMR was no stranger to disagreements prior to this period, but members told queerbeat that they had previously been limited to private, interpersonal conflicts. “Usually, we fight and the next day we come together. From so many years it has been this way in CSMR,” said Sreekanth Kannan, current member of CSMR and the Executive Director of Aneka, a queer support NGO. “This time some fighting happened and a group of people went and started their own coalition.”
On 27 August, 2024, CSGMR announced its separation from CSMR.
In its statement, the breakaway faction stated that its decision to split from CSMR was prompted by “ongoing concerns about the treatment of partnering organisations, the fairness of election processes, the representation of members within working committees, and the management of complaints within CSMR.”
The statement accused CSMR of a lack of operational transparency, including in the management of funds, reluctance to democratise the decision-making process, and aggressive arguments in the face of disagreement.
Last year, with CSGMR announcing its intent to “revitalize and reshape… pride celebrations in Karnataka,” the Bengaluru queer community was abuzz with speculation about the possibility of two Pride marches in November. However, as 24 November, the scheduled date of the CSMR Namma Pride drew nearer, the absence of any further communication from CSGMR about its plans put the rumours to rest.
On 18 November 2024, CSMR released its own public statement on Instagram. It claimed that the decision to form a new organisation, CSGMR, had been taken “without prior discussion with the existing committee or attempts to reconcile differences.” Asserting that CSMR remained committed to an inclusive and united Pride that “values collaboration over division,” it said CSMR was “striving to learn from these events and rebuild our sense of community.”
CSMR published a second statement on 23 November 2024 specifically addressing the allegations made by CSGMR. It contested the allegations of financial mismanagement, affirmed CSMR’s commitment to inclusivity and the safety of everyone attending Pride, and condemned those who were making allegations without offering any evidence. The statement concluded with CSMR expressing hope that Bengaluru’s queer community would shift its focus “from spreading misinformation to the need of the hour: coming together to assert our identities and demand equal rights in a unified voice”.
On the next day, 24 November, the CSMR Namma Pride March went ahead as planned.
However, it was not the only queer event in Bengaluru that day. While the Pride March was underway in central Bengaluru, a protest with the slogan ‘Reclaim Pride’ was also taking place barely a few kilometres away. Organised by the Students for People’s Democracy (SfPD), a Marxist-Leninist students’ collective, the stated aim of the event was to oppose the alleged inclusion of corporates in Namma Pride.
Denzel, an SfPD member, told queerbeat that the protest originated from SfPD’s “discomfort with how corporatised Namma Pride was getting and the lack of financial transparency, particularly with regard to corporate funding.” They said SfPD had objections to the way Namma Pride was being organised even before the split, including concerns around “the lack of diverse voices in the decision making of CSMR.”
Despite the split and the parallel event, CSMR claimed that more people participated in Namma Pride 2024 than ever before. “Every year, around nine thousand people attend. In 2024, eleven thousand people attended the Namma Pride March,” said Dilfaraz of CSMR.
According to Dilfaraz, CSMR calculates attendance numbers based on the number of flags and other paraphernalia that are distributed to attendees. queerbeat is unable to independently verify the claimed numbers.
“This split has clearly not made a difference to the broader community as far as attending Pride is concerned,” Dilfaraz added.
Attendance numbers notwithstanding, many sources queerbeat spoke to—including members of CSMR, CSGMR and other queer collectives— said that the split had inflicted personal and systemic harm on Bengaluru’s queer communities.
In early November 2024, a dissent note, signed by 48 queer individuals, was sent to both CSMR and CSGMR. The note expressed concerns about the split and the various allegations of impropriety that had emerged with regards to Pride organising. Disagreeing with the idea of two Pride marches, it demanded “that members managing Pride set aside their differences and come together for the community.”
For those at the heart of the split, the personal cost has been significant. Priyank Asha Sukanand is a Bangalore based activist, recent Karnataka State Head for the Congress LGBTQIA+ professional vertical, and one of the founding members of CSGMR. He speaks about the split in terms of a loss of relationships and friendships that had been solid for years. “People I had been friends with or known for years were now at odds with me. It felt like there was no room for negotiation and reconciliation,” he said.
Kris, a member of the peer-led collective All Sorts of Queer, brought up the possibility of the split threatening the already diminishing solidarity in the queer community. All Sorts of Queer collaborates with the Pride committee every year to host events. “Splitting up in this way gives the impression that people can’t trust each other in this community, and that they can only talk to people they already know and align with,” she said.
Beyond the personal impact, the split has also likely damaged the credibility of queer rights advocacy efforts in Bengaluru. “The impact is already seen,” said Mallu. “Different groups are meeting political leaders and the leaders understand there is a divide.” Pointing out that infighting within a marginalised community restricts the progress of the entire group, they warned: “We will not be able to get affirmative action, for example horizontal reservations for trans people, because we are not standing strong. We are indulging in infighting and people see that.”
As with any large intersectional collective, CSMR has seen its share of ups and downs over the past twenty years. While the 2024 split was unprecedented in its visibility and impact, in many ways it is yet another example of the conditions that fracture collectives and social movements.
Being a loosely held coalition of queer individuals and organisations, CSMR almost acts as a microcosm of the queer organising in India. Diverse groups struggle to assert their identities and be seen in a resource limited environment.
“While I did not imagine that these disagreements would lead to a split, I wasn’t surprised it happened,” said Neelima Prasanna Aryan, a member of All Sorts of Queer. “I think feminist spaces and queer spaces are split all the time.”
Deepak Dhananjaya, a queer psychotherapist and organisation consultant who has spent a decade working with organisations and people’s movements, sees the split as a result of “underlying unconscious dynamics” coming to the surface.
“What seems like interpersonal differences and power grabbing is not a new phenomenon in the larger queer community. When these anxieties are not spoken or recognised, the groups behave as if their job is to compete with each other,” he said. In Deepak’s opinion, when multiple identities and interests come together under a single umbrella, there is often an “illusory fear” that different identities co-existing is a threat, which could result in each individual identity “losing its uniqueness.”
To understand how such splits in the queer movement compared to similar episodes in the feminist movement, queerbeat reached out to Chayanika Shah, a queer activist who has been involved in queer and feminist organising for over four decades. In her view, the feminist movement has always been united by a central organising principle: “dismantling patriarchy.” In contrast, she believes that the queer movement currently lacks this principle.
“I don’t even call it ‘the queer movement,” she said. “I call it ‘queer organising,’ because in the queer space, I don’t see a transformative approach to the system post the reading down of Section 377 [a legal provision that criminalised same sex sexual activity]. That was the one time the entire community came together. After that, it has become about rights-based approaches. Every identity under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella seems to be pursuing their own demands without really standing with or for the other identities.” Given the feminist movement didn’t have these kinds of sub-groups with their own specific agendas, she believes, the splits within feminist organisations did not “threaten the overall movement.” Whereas the queer movement, in the absence of a larger goal holding it together, ends up being fractured by these splits.
Chayanika’s point can be illustrated by how those working on currently-prominent queer causes like marriage equality and horizontal reservations seem to share little common ground in terms of their struggles and aspirations. When a certain issue predominantly affects one identity, the rest of the community does not look at its participation in that cause as necessary.
This is in line with the 2024 queerbeat article about queer voting habits, which indicated that many queer people do not necessarily prioritise queer issues while voting and do not feel a sense of solidarity in the community. Instead, most of those who were interviewed stated that their voting choices were influenced by their religious, caste, or class identity.
Besides not having a common structural goal, the conflicts and splits in queer organising might also be a result of the constant pressure many groups in the larger queer community have to deal with to meet basic survival needs. “We are always managing crises, where do you find time to rest, relax, reflect?” asked Tashi Choedup, a monastic and activist currently based in Hyderabad, who has, in the past, been involved in conflict meditation in Bengaluru’s queer community. “Oppression rarely gives us an opportunity.”
Sometimes different groups are so caught up in fighting for their individual priorities that there is limited space to resolve things, to imagine and create a better, more inclusive future, Tashi told queerbeat. This dynamic, in Tashi’s opinion, then leads the groups and people within them to replicate the same power structures that they have suffered under and are resisting against.
Chayanika concurred with Tashi’s line of thought, adding that unlike cis women, queer people are constantly forced to fight “invisibility and non-recognition of their existence.” “In that sense the fight is much more intense and is against everyone and everything starting from one's own mind and self,” she said.
But perhaps splits are not all bad either. “I used to think that all splits are a bad idea,” said Bittu K.R, a scientist who has helped organise grassroot movements including queer collectives for over two decades. If the splits happen because of ideological differences, they are sometimes necessary because they allow everyone to function based on their priorities and principles, explained Bittu.
Sometimes splits are about power. Sangama, Bengaluru’s oldest queer rights collective, experienced a split in 2009. A few members, who felt that there was too much concentration of power in the organisation’s leadership, broke away and started their own organisation, Payana. Through the new group, they felt freer to express their voice, said a former member of Payana who didn’t want to reveal their identity.
“When such clashes do happen, one just hopes they don’t cause harm, especially to young queers,” said Bittu.
Drawing from her experience in the women’s movement, Chayanika stated that queer organisers probably need to stop limiting themselves to fighting for specific rights—instead, she believes they must focus on building common platforms that can bring the entire community together.
“Feminist transformative movements might have campaigns that demand rights within existing systems, but they also have a critique of the system guiding them. Until you have a critique of the system, you can’t have a transformative movement,” she said. “The queer movement does not have that at the moment, and that makes it very difficult to work with polar opposites within the movement.”
However, Chayanika believes that these are long term goals, and that patience is vital. “These things take so long, 50 years is not enough time. I want us to hold on to what we have and wait and strengthen ourselves to build more communicative spaces,” she said. At the time of publication, the two groups remain divided. CSGMR has announced that it will host a Pride March on 15 June 2025. CSMR is likely to go ahead with its Pride March this November.
“Let there be 10 prides, why not?” said Mallu of CSMR. “Two prides are good, we can talk about more, we will also participate in their pride, just leave the ego and I will also come to participate.”
Sweta Daga (she/her) is a queer multimedia independent journalist based in Bangalore. Her work focuses on the intersection of climate justice, gender, and livelihoods.
Anirudh (they/them) is a trans activist and writer based in Bangalore. They are interested in the use of language and dialogue for collective action.
Visvak is a writer and editor, mostly of narrative nonfiction.
Jose (she/they) is a non-binary illustrator from Kerala whose work highlights personal stories marked by gender, body experiences and their south-Indian heritage. While not lost in their sketchbook, they can be found devouring all things camp and horror.
Ankur Paliwal (he/they) is a queer journalist, and founder and managing editor of queerbeat.
