The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is attending the hearing in the top court of a batch of 15 petitions filed by diverse groups of religious, political and social bodies challenging the Delhi high court’s decision to decriminalise same-sex relations between consenting adults with apprehension.
Enakshi Ganguly Thukral, co-director of the HAQ Centre for Child Rights and a signatory to the Voices Against 377 group that had petitioned the Delhi high court against Section 377 of the IPC which had described same-sex relations as a punishable offence, pointed out, “I believe adults right to have consensual sex should be legal. I am strongly opposed to former DPCRR chairman Amod Kanth (a petitioner) taking his personal bias against homosexuality to the Supreme Court. There is no doubt that the present law is inadequate for dealing with sexual abuse of boys but that cannot be corrected by making homosexuality illegal.” “As a person who has spent her entire life fighting for child’s rights, I believe we cannot pit child rights against the rights of the LGBT community,” she added. Pramada Menon, who belongs to the Voices Against 377 coalition of NGOs, is more subdued in her comments. She pointed out: “We have no idea how the case will pan out and more importantly, the case is subjudice.”
Even Anjal Gopalan of the Naz Foundation, which works in the area of HIV AIDS, and also the petitioner for the case in the Delhi high court in 2001 for seeking abolition of Section 377, is tacit in her comments, stating that she was happy the hearings had started because “at least we will have some kind of judgment”. Activist Sujata Madhok said the recent flip-flop of the government on homosexuality was a “reflection of the innate conservatism in our society and government that gets reflected either deliberately or accidentally”.