Historic challenge to constitutionality of Section 377 in Supreme Court begins:
Live updates with The Leaflet
The five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court, presided over by Chief Justice
of India, Dipak Misra will begin hearing of batch of petitions challenging section 377 of IPC
which criminalises and penalises what it terms an “unnatural offence”, insofar as provision adversely affect consensual relations between adults.
Live updates with The Leaflet
The five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court, presided over by Chief Justice
of India, Dipak Misra will begin hearing of batch of petitions challenging section 377 of IPC
which criminalises and penalises what it terms an “unnatural offence”, insofar as provision adversely affect consensual relations between adults.
WATCH] TheLeaflet_in co-founder and Senior Advocate Supreme Court — Anand Grover — talks to queer rights activist Chayanika Shah. #LeafLens
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Datar is now reading passages from the privacy judgement, starting off with para 108. He says, Para 108 emphasises the importance of dignity, and should be read with paras 118 and 119.Datar further refers to paras 144, 145, 248 and 250 of the privacy judgement.
[COMMENT] Queer rights activist and scholar Gautam Bhan says: For many queer people, this moment is familiar. It is one that many of us have faced or live in a constant fear of facing. In some ways, it is the latter that is worse. We live our lives anticipating prejudice. Even before it comes, we are constantly censoring, moving, and shaping our lives to evade it or, if we can’t, to survive it. Those of us who have the privilege of privacy scan rooms to find allies, weigh what to tell our doctors, measure out information in our offices, and seek safe spaces. Those without this privilege face a much more direct battle to be who they are: an unrelenting and legitimised public violence that falls on working class bodies in our streets, police stations and public spaces. The law is not the only force behind this violence, but it is an important one. “Why do you think,” the blackmailer asks, “it’s illegal to be gay in India?” When petitioners in the Naz Foundation case argued that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code played an important part in shrouding our lives in criminality and of legitimising violence, this letter was one of many that we wrote against in our heads.
Yet, what happened next is also a story of what has changed since 2001 when the case was filed. The student, at some point, answered his blackmailer. He pinned a reply on the same noticeboard and spoke about not being ashamed of his sexuality. Even before the Delhi High Court judgment of 2009, the language of how we talked about homosexuality and gender identity had begun to — slowly, but surely — shift. When we spoke about our lives, we spoke of dignity, not obscenity; of persons, not acts; of friendship, love and sex; of genders in the plural, not the fixed and dichotomous; of a full human life. We fought our demons, we marched on streets, we made support groups, we sheltered people who ran away. We lost many along the way. Too many. We will lose more still. Yet slowly, even if still incompletely, queer people have begun to win the greatest battle of our lives: we have begun to believe that we have the right to have rights. We have begun to believe that we have the right to dignity, the right to our bodies, the right to be happy. Whether these rights come through law or through struggle, they will come. In a moment where there are so many that are made to believe that they are redundant and negligible, the value of this cannot be underestimated. The Delhi High Court judgment made us believe it that much more — perhaps another generation has inherited only some of our fears. You cannot blackmail someone, said the student who isn’t ashamed.
Today, [the court] has an opportunity. An opportunity to defend not a “minuscule minority” but a democracy we all share. An opportunity to remember its promise to be the last resort of the bewildered and the oppressed, to remember that rights expand and grow and that they cannot be, must not be, taken back and shrunk. An opportunity, more than anything, to write back to the blackmailer’s letter and tell its author that they will not let dignity be the domain of the few and injustice the everyday of the many.
[COURT UPDATES] Datar is referring to judgements from the European Court Of Human Rights. He cites judgement from Trinidad and Tobago
Justice Indu Malhotra, the only woman judge on the Constitution bench, now speaks after Aravind Datar’s submission on homosexuality as a normal & benign variation of “human sexuality”: It (homosexuality) is not only seen in humans but also in animals....
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