Is India Ready For Section 377?

The landmark 377 judgment has ushered in a new sexual morality in India. But the battle between progressive and regressive social mores looms.

- Damayanti Datta

‘Seeking 25-40, well-placed, animal loving, vegetarian groom for my son 36, 5’11’’ who works with an NGO, caste no bar (though Iyer preferred).’

When Padma Vishwanath placed this matrimonial ad in a Mumbai newspaper for her gay son in 2015, the first such ad in India, she just wanted her son to be happy. She did not know that he could face criminal charges for it, nor that she was doing anything unusual. She had faced heartbreak when he first came out as gay, only to transcend over the years—as mothers can—family pride, the moral panic of relatives or the fear of being judged by strangers. On Thursday, September 6, the Supreme Court validated what she had told her son long ago: “You can be yourself.” Padma was on top of the world: “It’s time to recognise that they are normal, just as left-handed children are.”

Sometimes you need to look into the crystal ball to understand the present. The five seniormost judges of the Supreme Court did just that by dumping in the dustbin of history the degrading punishment enshrined in the black letter of law for different ways of loving and living, affecting one in 10 Indian men and women, at least. The Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra opened the landmark judgment (Navtej Singh Johar & Ors. vs The Union of India) quoting the German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “I am what I am, so take me as I am.” Along with Justices A.M. Khanwilkar, D.Y. Chandrachud, R.F. Nariman and Indu Malhotra, the bench declared Sec 377 of the Indian Penal Code unconstitutional. The 158-year-old law that made “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” a criminal offence was as good as weeded out—albeit 72 years after the British quit India and 51 years after the UK scrapped it from the statute book.

SHAKING THE FOUNDATION OF THE GREAT INDIAN FAMILY?