Ramesh Bhattarai, a human rights activist from Sunsari, says that they will continue to be deprived of the opportunity to vote unless a safe and respectful registration environment is created at the local level.
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Voter registration data released for the House of Representatives elections to be held on February 21 has shown that political participation of gender and sexual minorities in Sunsari is very low.
Only 2 gender and sexual minority voters have been registered in all four constituencies of the district. According to the District Election Office, Sunsari, there is one gender and sexual minority voter each in Constituencies No. 1 and 2, while there is none in Constituencies No. 3 and 4. In Sunsari, which has four constituencies for the House of Representatives, there are 586,945 voters, including 294,252 men and 286,691 women, and the number of gender and sexual minority voters is only 2, which clearly shows that inclusive democracy is still limited on paper. Although the Constitution of Nepal does not discriminate on the basis of gender identity and guarantees equal rights to gender and sexual minority citizens, in practice their access to the state machinery is still weak.
Ramesh Bhattarai, a human rights activist from Sunsari, says that many gender and sexual minority citizens have been excluded from voter registration due to the existing complexities in the issues of citizenship, voter registration, social acceptance and security. According to Bhattarai, their number is very low not only in Sunsari but also across the country due to fear, humiliation and systemic obstacles.
According to gender and sexual minority rights activists, the voter registration process itself is not easy for them. Human rights activist Devananda Chaudhary says that many gender and sexual minority citizens are forced to stay away from the public system due to humiliating treatment at registration centers, fear of revealing their identity, and pressure from family and society.
‘Even though rights are written in the law, the state is not yet ready in practice,’ says rights activist Chaudhary, who is also the program coordinator of the Human Welfare Society Itahari, which works in the field of rights of sexual and gender minorities. ‘It is difficult to get citizenship, but registering your name in the voter list is the first step towards political participation. If that is so difficult, then representation is a very distant matter.’
While political parties are limited to the slogan of inclusive democracy, this data has raised questions about how inclusive the electoral system itself is. Chaudhary says that the mere symbolic presence of sexual and gender minority citizens in a district with more than 550,000 voters raises serious questions about the quality of democracy.
Chaudhary says that the rights written in the constitution will not be transformed into practice unless the Election Commission, local levels and political parties take joint initiatives to increase voter registration of sexual and gender minority communities.
Human rights activist Bhattarai says that unless the Election Commission team conducts a door-to-door campaign to register gender and sexual minorities as voters and creates a safe and respectful registration environment at the local level, they will continue to be deprived of the opportunity to vote. Bhattarai says, “Unless social awareness and identity recognition are emphasized, their story is the same in every election.”
