Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) national spokesperson Anish Gawande has come under the spotlight after CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke was found staying at his Delhi residence during the ongoing protests led by Sonam Wangchuk and the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms (CJP). Dipke was reportedly at Gawande’s house to change clothes when Delhi Police launched an operation to remove Wangchuk and other protesters from Jantar Mantar on July 18.
According to Gawande, police personnel entered the building and briefly detained Dipke from the staircase of his residence. Gawande alleged that Dipke was assaulted while being taken into custody and claimed he could hear him shouting during the incident. Delhi Police has not publicly confirmed these allegations.
Following the police action, Gawande strongly criticised the removal of Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike for nearly 20 days before being shifted to Safdarjung Hospital after his health deteriorated. He accused the Delhi Police of removing Wangchuk without any written order and alleged that the operation was intended to break up the ongoing protest rather than address medical concerns. He also appealed to supporters to join the agitation in large numbers.
Gawande has been among the prominent political leaders extending support to the CJP-led protest and has repeatedly voiced solidarity with Wangchuk and the organisers through social media posts.
Gawande is the first openly gay person to be appointed as the national spokesperson of a political party in India. Before joining politics, he was an LGBTQ+ rights activist, writer and the founder of Pink List India, a database documenting politicians who publicly support LGBTQ+ rights.
The grandson of freedom fighter, lawyer and educationist T.K. Tope, Gawande studied at Greenlawns School and Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai before pursuing Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He later studied Intellectual History and Public Policy at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
After initially planning an academic career, Gawande entered electoral politics in 2018 and was appointed National Spokesperson of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) in August 2024.
He also recently backed the film Satluj, based on the life of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, after it was withdrawn from the Zee5 OTT platform shortly after its release. In a social media post, he criticised the decision to remove the film, arguing that it suppressed discussion on a sensitive chapter of Punjab’s history.
