Somehow, he managed to send a message of distress out to queer activists including myself, who engaged lawyers to petition the court and release him from his natal family’s control. Through our day-long ordeal, I witnessed his mother showering the filthiest homophobic and transphobic barbs at him in the presence of the station chief, who asked him why he was so averse to ‘conversion therapy’, the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to alter a person’s sexual orientation, which his family had recommended he try.
Five years after the Supreme Court‘s landmark verdict on Section 377, this case still isn’t unique. Over the years, activists have reported many such instances involving families arm-twisting their own children out of relationships with those they love. Decriminalisation was meant to protect consenting adults. Yet, widespread prejudice and discrimination, especially within the police, has meant that they are often willing participants in family-sponsored violence on adults in non-conforming relationships, which are seen as illegitimate.
Would families, and society at large, view relationships between queer people with legitimacy, with a greater ounce of dignity attached to them, if these had the sanction and protection of the law, in the way that rights associated with marriage offer? How many lives and love stories remain interrupted because this yearning for a life of dignity remains outside the reach of most queer people?
Could queer people qualify for these rights that every other Indian takes for granted? These are some of the questions that petitioners arguing for marriage equality in India’s apex court have been wrestling with.
Last Tuesday, at the long-awaited judgment on marriage equality, the Supreme Court dealt us a devastating blow. Not only did the majority verdict refuse to recognise marriage as a fundamental right, it squarely laid the prerogative of any inclusion of queer people within new or existing matrimonial statutes, or any moves to secure the rights of people in queer relationships in any other form of union, upon Parliament.Yet, even within this fairly conservative majority verdict, there seems to be no mandatory injunction to our legislative bodies to act, let alone act within a given timeframe to ensure the protection of the law accrues to queer relationships. Based on the solicitor general’s submission before the court, the majority judgment recommends the setting up of a high-powered committee chaired by the Union Cabinet secretary to examine the issues related to queer kinship, speak to all stakeholders involved and make recommendations to GoI, though seemingly GoI is in no way required to implement them.While this verdict does make important nods to the state’s responsibility to protect queer people from threats or coercion to their lives, it is unclear how this offers anything new that may be enforceable on the ground, in, for instance, the case that I had the misfortune to witness earlier this year.
Where do queer people go from here? Almost 10 years ago, as the community reeled from another disappointing Supreme Court verdict that re-criminalised us under Section 377, I remember spontaneous protests erupting all over India, including one at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.
With the space for dissent shrinking and protests at sites like Jantar Mantar and Azad Maidan being circumscribed increasingly by the police, few public protests, or even gatherings of solidarity, have taken place this time. Most of our activism has moved online, where brawls with bots are more likely, and empathetic tete-a-tete conversations with everyday people are less frequent.
Within queer organising, the quest for marriage equality has also been somewhat divisive, with some viewing marriage as a patriarchal institution that the community should not emulate. Further, over the 18 years that the case against Section 377 wound its way through various courts, queer Indians had engaged with their fellow citizens outside the community, persuading them over long periods of the need for that oppressive law to go. That engagement, vital in the transformation of hearts and minds, has not occurred in the same way with the issue of marriage equality.
But this loss in the Supreme Court may be an opportunity for the community to reorient its communication, and find new ways of taking our message of radical equality to everyone. Within the minority judgment proffered by the chief justice is a long, though by no means exhaustive, list of sensitisation and anti-discrimination measures, including rights related to, but not restricted to, marriage, that we would be wise to take up next.
Perhaps it is time to return to hard, grounded work within our communities. When we know we are on the right side of history, what is yet another day in the trenches with comrades?
The writer is a queer historian, activist and petitioner in the case for marriage equality
