On August 5, over breakfast at 6, Janpath, in New Delhi, I was appointed National Spokesperson for the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar).
To say that the role came as a surprise would be an understatement. Although I had worked on elections in varying capacities for almost a decade, I had never taken up a formal position within a political party. The idea that you could be out and in Indian politics seemed patently absurd — and, despite my own tendencies to be an audacious idealist, I knew that the tricky terrains of desi rajneeti (politics) required you to be a hard-nosed realist.
The last two months have been a rollercoaster ride, with prime-time television debates complemented by long journeys to the interiors of Maharashtra on the Vidhan Sabha campaign trail. The barrage of headlines announcing me as “India’s first gay national spokesperson” — some salacious, others adulatory, a few truly interrogative — have quietened down. Over endless cups of chai and conversations with karyakartas (party workers) and leaders across the state, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect upon what this new journey really entails and why it matters.
How we got here
I’m not your conventional politician. I don’t come from a political family, nor have I married into one (yet). I don’t have a constituency where everyone knows me and I know everybody.
Although I’ve worked on multiple election campaigns — including as a door-to-door volunteer on the 2014 Lok Sabha elections with Milind Deora and a strategist on the 2019 Lok Sabha elections with the Maharashtra Congress — I always saw myself as a back-room strategist.
The first time I saw the possibility of taking on a more prominent role was after the creation of Pink List India, the country’s first archive of politicians who have supported LGBTQ+ rights. I realised that queer political representation — which I had so far seen as a distant dream — was actually surprisingly close to becoming a tangible reality in years, not decades.
My work with Pink List India introduced me to Supriya Sule, or Supriya tai, as she is fondly known across Maharashtra. We met for the first time at the Harvard US-India conference in 2020, where I had invited her to speak on a panel I was moderating. Ever since, I kept in touch informally — offering policy suggestions at some stages, seeking her support with food relief work I was carrying out during the Covid-19 pandemic at others. After coming back from Oxford, where I spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar, I reached out to her before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to offer to help out in whatever capacity I could to unseat the ruling alliance in Maharashtra.
Gawande with Supriya Sule. (Photo: Instagram/@anishgawande)
After stumbling into her at the party’s office at Mumbai’s Ballard Estate, I was assigned tasks that ranged from research for the manifesto to the drafting of press releases. The Lok Sabha elections brought with them remarkable success, and the NCP (SP) secured a landmark strike rate of 80 per cent by winning 8 out of the 10 seats that it contested across Maharashtra. With that success, came additional responsibilities, and a conviction that there was no better time than now to take the plunge into the deep end of the pool that is Indian politics. A handwritten letter and several WhatsApp messages later, I found myself seated across Supriya tai in New Delhi being given the formal responsibility of representing the party in the national media.
Where we go from now
“Supriya tai picked you up, didn’t she?” Fauzia Khan asked me when we were in Marathwada’s Karanja last week for a rally. After I shared my story, she revealed how her own “accidental” entry into politics was made possible by a phone call, out of the blue, from Pawar saheb two decades ago. “This can only happen in the NCP,” she added, remarking on how Pawar saheb had seen her work in education and asked her to consider a career in politics. Khan went on to become the first Muslim woman cabinet minister in Maharashtra, and I have now become the first gay man to be appointed as national spokesperson for a political party in India.
Over the last two months, I have realised the weight of the responsibility that comes with the position I occupy today. Of course, there’s the responsibility of being the voice and face of the party right before a hotly-contested state election, where anything you say can and will be used against you — but that’s the easy bit. The more significant, more tricky responsibility comes with the weight of representation that falls on my shoulders. As a young boy, I thought that staying in the closet was the only option if I wanted to join politics in any capacity. That I can serve as a role model to others who find themselves in a similar position today is a thought that simultaneously fills me with pride and dread.
I have argued before that representation is hardly the panacea it’s made out to be. I am someone who grew up in Mumbai, with caste and class privilege, and then traipsed off to the US and the UK to pursue degrees that have since had no real connection to the career I’ve chosen. The “lucky breaks” I’ve had, when put into the context of the opportunities I’ve been showered with growing up, don’t seem that lucky. What role, then, does my queerness play in the new path I’ve chosen to tread upon?
That’s a question I’m still struggling to find the answer to. For now, I’ve tried to acknowledge that being national spokesperson means defending the party line on a whole range of issues — with queer issues constituting but a small part. Yet, I’ve attempted to see queerness not as a monolithic entity in the service of just the LGBTQ+ community but as a lens with which to critically examine and respond to the burning issues facing the country today. Queerness today has the potential to hold answers for the creation of new forums for dialogue and debate, for the managing of competing interests, for a reconciliation with the idea that we can at once be both oppressed and the oppressor. How that potential is explored, and to what extent, remains to be seen. After all, this journey’s just begun.
The writer is national spokesperson, NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar)
