Keshav Suri

Keshav Suri is an Indian hotelier, executive director of The Lalit Suri Hospitality Group, who is known in the social sector as a litigant against India's anti-sodomy law and as the founder of the Keshav Suri Foundation, which works on the employment, mental health and mainstreaming of LGBTQIA+ people.

In April 2016 Suri joined four other petitioners — the dancer Navtej Singh Johar, the journalist Sunil Mehra, the chef Ritu Dalmia and the hotelier Aman Nath, later joined by the businesswoman Ayesha Kapur — in a writ petition in the Supreme Court challenging Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. It was the first such case in which the petitioners argued as people directly harmed by the provision rather than on behalf of others, and it was decided in their favour in 2018 as Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India.

A month after that judgment, on 13 October 2018, the Keshav Suri Foundation was launched by Jyotsna Suri at the first National Dialogue, Queering the Pitch: Agents of Change, building on an earlier public campaign called #PureLove. Its stated purpose is to embrace, empower and mainstream deeply marginalised communities, with employability at the centre: the foundation pushes for gender-neutral workplace policies, runs sensitisation work with employers, and offers scholarships at a hospitality school and free mental health support. It is the Indian affiliate of the It Gets Better Project, and worked with Stonewall UK and Pride Circle to introduce the India Workplace Equality Index, a benchmark by which companies can measure their diversity and inclusion practice. Later projects extended the work beyond sexuality: Project Apna Heera for neurodivergent people and Project Prahari in support of acid attack survivors. Under Suri's direction the hotel group itself has employed more than 2,000 people from the LGBTQIA+ community and India's only differently-abled club DJ.

Suri chairs the FICCI task force on diversity and inclusion, through which he takes questions of employment, healthcare and safety for the community to policymakers, and is honorary chair of the IGLTA Foundation's India initiative. He has been named among the Top 100 LGBT+ Executives on the OUTstanding list published with Yahoo Finance in three consecutive years.[2][3][4]