New Delhi: Homosexuality is no longer a crime! In a historic judgment, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Thursday struck down parts of Section 377 and decriminalised homosexuality. The court said the right to love is an individual’s choice.
The Pride Parades, the protests, the fights, have all borne fruit and the LGBTQIA community can now heave a victorious sigh!
The apex court reversed its own 2013 decision which had restored Section 377, a controversial 158-year-old British-era ban on consensual gay sex.
Reading out the judgment, Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misha said that LGBTQ community has the same fundamental rights as others and that ‘heterogeneous fibre must be maintained’.
“No one can escape from their individualism. In the present case, our deliberations will be on various spectrums,” he added.
In July, five celebrity petitioners – Navtej Singh Jauhar, Sunil Mehra, Aman Nath, Ritu Dalmia and Ayesha Kapoor – had challenged that order. The five-judge constitution bench headed by CJI DIapk Misra began hearing their petitions on July 17. The bench also comprised Justices R F Nariman, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Indu Malhotra. That was a ray of hope for the LGBTQIA community as it began an emotional debate over the right to freedom and privacy. However, the SC then only focused on consensual sex between two individuals of the same sex and did not scrap Section 377 as a whole.
The Centre had said that Section 377 punishes individuals involved in ‘unnatural intercourse’, which they believe is exploiting animals and girls/boys below the age of 18.
The first one to raise the issue was Naaz Foundation, which had filed a petition in 2001 and the court had declared this law criminalizing gay sex as ‘illegal’. However, the SC scrapped this order on December 11, 2013, and declared Section 377 as legal.
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