Global Courant 2023-04-19 03:52:32
NEW DELHI – The two women fought their families, survived beatings, endured death threats and were forced to separate before they could live together as a couple. Now they are fighting for their right to get married in India.
“It gives us a legal proof and I can show it to my parents, who are still against our relationship,” said Ms Bhawna, who, like her partner, Ms Kajal, has only one name.
On Tuesday, the couple, along with more than a dozen others, got their day in India’s Supreme Court, which began hearing arguments in a case to legalize same-sex marriage.
In recent years, the court has blocked individual freedoms, including scrapping a ban on consensual gay sex, granting rights to India’s marginalized transgender community and declaring privacy a constitutional right of all Indians.
It’s unclear how long the court will take to reach a decision, but a ruling in favor of the petitioners would make India an outlier for gay rights in Asia, where most countries still ban same-sex marriage.
India’s conservative Hindu nationalist government opposes legalization of unions, calling gay marriage an “urban elitist concept far removed from the country’s social ethos” in a court case Monday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has argued that granting legal recognition to relations “is essentially a function of the legislature”, not the judiciary. It has also argued that marriage is an “exclusively heterogeneous institution” and that any interference with it would “create utter chaos” in India’s deeply religious society.
Some advocates of marriage equality have rejected the idea that societal norms in India are not evolving.
“The problem is this idea of vulnerability, that’s just completely self-created,” said Ms Menaka Guruswamy, a senior lawyer representing multiple petitioners in the case, including two lesbian couples and a trans woman.
“Hindu society has enabled reform since independence,” she said, citing the changes to a series of laws in the 1950s that allowed Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists to intermarry from different religions and castes. Other laws allowed divorce, the chance to adopt, and equal rights for women to inherit property.
Now, Ms Guruswamy said, same-sex couples need “a language” to present their relationships as authentically as their heterosexual counterparts, in a society where young people grow up watching Bollywood movies about “mismatched lovers and “parental opposition”. . Those stories, she said, should make it easier, not harder, for Indians to accept love in all its forms.
Nearly five years ago, the Supreme Court ushered in a new era for LGBTQ rights in India. The ban on gay sex, a relic of the country’s colonial past, was “indefensible,” the court said in its unanimous ruling. In that landmark case, the court ruled that “an individual’s sexual autonomy” is at the heart of “individual freedom,” and thus had no place in the country’s legal system.
Those actions fueled hopes that the court would act as a socially liberal counterbalance to the conservative ethos of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
But many members of India’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community say they still live marginalized lives.
