“I can’t bear the thought of anyone knowing such personal things about me,” said a queer woman I was mentoring during one of our sessions last year, as we looked at each other over Zoom. I wished then that I could have reached out and comforted her, but I simply nodded and looked down.
The woman had moved from India to London on a student visa and was hoping to find work so that she could stay after her two-year graduate visa ended. In the UK, she was able to live openly as a queer woman and felt free. But she knew that, if she returned, she could be in danger.
She wanted to apply for asylum to stay in the UK, but doing so would require her to submit a detailed witness statement, describing her experiences as a queer woman, to the Home Office. Ideally, she should back this up with ‘evidence’ of her claims, such as medical letters or witness statements from friends, family, and current or former partners.
The process is risky: if anybody she knew in India found out what she’d written, she would be in danger. It also demands LGBTQ+ people fit their experiences into narrow social scripts, even though different cultures understand, express and practise sexuality and gender in entirely different ways.
Of course, the asylum system offers little space for the complexity of these realities. It offers little nuance, dignity, respect or culturally informed care for people going through such a difficult process.
The woman’s dilemma exposes a deeper contradiction: Britain’s asylum system demands intimate proof of queerness from people whose countries still have laws and social norms shaped by British colonial rule. It presents itself as offering protection while reproducing the racial, sexual and gendered hierarchies that helped create the danger from which many flee.
The asylum system is built on the legacy of the colonial-era British Raj – on the blood and tears of the occupied – and still echoes its controlling logic. It sets people up to fail because there is no liberation in this oppression that has never fully stopped.
Take the rule that restricts asylum-seeking people from working, forcing them to survive on minimal financial support. It upholds the control enforced by the British Empire, when people in India were told they could not work in certain industries, such as Indian-owned workshops prevented from designing and manufacturing their own locomotives.
The British Empire itself normalised migration on an enormous scale as it moved around the world to strip countries of their resources and seize their land, uprooting entire communities and fuelling conflict. In India, British rule culminated in Partition – the division of British India into two independent states, India and Pakistan – whose aftermath also shaped the conflict that led to Bangladesh’s independence. These events saw as many as two million people killed.
India and Pakistan are now both among the ten most common countries of origin for people applying for asylum in the UK. “Almost 70% of asylum applications since 2001 were made by people from countries that experienced colonial rule, violence or resource extraction at the hands of Britain,” according to an analysis of the Home Office’s 2024 statistics by the charity Refugee Action.
Many like to point out that Partition was a long time ago. It was in 1947, 79 years ago. But my grandad is older. At 93, he clearly remembers British rule. It affected him, his family, his children and their migration to the UK. India was not divided and then allowed to rest: Partition left territorial conflict, violence and displacement that continue to this day.
And with this trauma comes silence.
It is the same silence carried by queer people leaving a country that still bears the imprint of British colonial laws. India’s Supreme Court finally decriminalised consensual same-sex relations in 2018, but that was only eight years ago. Queer people were criminalised until then, and decriminalisation alone does not afford them equal rights.
This year, proposed changes to India’s transgender rights law have again threatened to exclude entire identities in an attempt to invalidate them. The bill would, among other things, drastically narrow the definition of transgender and remove the right to self-identification, forcing a trans person to obtain certification of their gender identity from medical boards and district authorities. It recalls the British Raj’s 1871 Criminal Tribes Act, which branded entire communities, including trans and gender-nonconforming people, as “hereditary criminals”.
Before colonial rule, trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people lived differently in India. While their lives were, of course, far from perfect, their identities were not criminalised or subjected to the same surveillance.
When the British enforced laws criminalising homosexuality in India to “Westernise” its people, they imposed rigid ideas about sexuality and gender. That same logic continues through the UK asylum system today. How can the Home Office expect us to prove our sexuality, our gender or our understanding of how we change and shift as we grow? How can we fit ourselves into the ‘male’ and ‘female’ boxes it has created when Indigenous understandings of gender may be distinctly different?
Britain still believes it has control over the people it once occupied – and, in many ways, it does. It continues to exercise dominion through an impossible asylum system, a form of neo-colonialism. The term, popularised in the 1960s by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, describes the practice of controlling formerly colonised countries through continued economic, political and cultural pressure, even after formally leaving their land.
As in the colonial era, Britain then reprimands those who fall out of line: through detention, deportation and the stripping away of hope.
Last month, the BBC published an undercover investigation alleging that rogue legal advisers were encouraging migrants, many from South Asian countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, to pretend to be LGBTQ+ to obtain asylum. Such findings will only increase scrutiny of LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, when we need intense scrutiny of the system that forces people into scripted narratives – and of the political and media responses that stigmatise entire groups for the actions of a few.
My mentee looked up at me from her screen and sighed.
“If my family finds out, I’m toast. If I don’t tell the Home Office, it will be harder to explain why I can’t go back. What should I do?”
Her eyes pleaded with me.
But I did not have the answers. Refugees have been set up to fail by a system that seeks to control racialised, queer and gendered migration. Britain’s criminalisation of homosexuality in India helped lead us to this moment.
A new system could bring the hope and change we desperately need, for the sake of humanity, and represent a step away from the imperialism that has shrouded British governance for so long.
Britain may be a place to which many people attempt to migrate, but it is not a utopia. For many, it is a refuge from the harms that Britain itself helped to create. It must acknowledge that history if it is ever going to change.
