India's third gender at crossroads: A human rights perspective

India's Third Gender (with reference to Hijras and Transgender) lies at the intersection of community, society, nation and international human rights law regime and are simultaneously ‘included’ and ‘excluded’ from the enjoyment of equal rights. Applying the notion of human rights this paper tries to situate the Problematique and tries to analyse the disjuncture between formally guaranteed constitutional rights and the State's dual role of both ‘inactiveness’ and ‘discrimination’ under the dominance of patriarchal values that relates to various experiences of discrimination of the Third Gender in India. With the increase of Judicial Activism, where the Supreme Court of India is turning to human rights law to interpret constitutional guarantees of equality and freedom from discrimination, this article tries to evaluate the possibility for the Hijras and Transgenders to move towards equality through the translation of human rights from a universal to a local context. However, the paper concludes by examining the ‘Substantive Dilemmas’, that exist in the way of realisation of human rights in India, (for e.g. laws related to Article 377) and also tries to capture the interplay between global justice on one hand and local politics on the other.