The 2018 Navtej Singh Johar judgment of the Supreme Court of India that read down §377 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 has been celebrated as a landmark moment heralding the progression of queer and transgender people from criminality to citizenship. However, this narrative is undermined by continuing forms of criminalisation and violence affecting trans and queer people, especially those from working class and Dalit backgrounds. In this context, this paper builds on an established trajectory of academic and activist critique to interrogate how §377 was made into an overarching symbol of homophobia and anti-LGBT discrimination in India, thus producing an aggrandised and homogenised narrative about its impact while eliding or downplaying various other forms of criminalisation and social violence. Further, this paper theorises the symbolic politics around §377 as a case of synecdochic symbolism wherein a part is made to stand in for the whole, arguing that anti-§377 campaigns strategically subsumed forms of violence or discrimination that were unrelated or very tangentially related to §377 under the sign of the law. The paper explores how synecdochic symbolism functioned as an appropriative mechanism to harvest the material violence faced by working class and Dalit transgender and queer people to strengthen the anti-§377 movement, while providing greater political benefits to queer and trans people from elite class/caste locations. It argues that synecdochic symbolism facilitated the emergence of an empowered queer citizen figure represented by elite LGBT people while offering only tentative protections to, and sometimes even endangering, less privileged trans and queer people.