On Wednesday, India’s 20-year-old legal battle to legalise gay sex received a boost when the government told judges that the decision was up to them and it will not contest the petitions.
This development greatly increases the probability that the court will move to abolish the law that holds homosexuality as a criminal offence, reports The Guardian.
Even before this move, the court seemed likely to rule in favour of legalising sex between consenting adults. Last year, it gave a landmark ruling that guaranteed the constitutional right to privacy, saying that a person’s sexual orientation was “an essential attribute of privacy”. This, many lawyers said, laid the path for the court to abolish the law.
According to The Guardian, lawyers have been deploying every possible weapon in their arsenal to convince the five judges. They have invoked the culture of antiquity, previous legal precedents in other countries, the animal kingdom, and the fact that homosexuality is innate and not a matter of choice, the relativity of moral values from age to age and ancient Indian temple sculptures.
Lawyers argued that for much for its pre-British Raj history, India had been relaxed about depictions of same-sex love; in Hinduism, gods transformed into goddesses and men became pregnant. The famous erotic images on Khajuraho temple in central India included women embracing other women and men displaying their genitals to each other.
It was only when the British settled in India, they argued, that their “rigid Victorian morality” replaced the earlier Indian acceptance of homosexuality.
Other points cited in favour of legalising gay sex were that the Indian Psychiatric Society had called for decriminalisation because homosexuality was not a disorder.