Homosexuality Decriminalized – India truly Liberalized

All the major newspapers and television channels were agog with a headline news item recently. The headline was “Homosexuality in India decriminalized”. This referred to the landmark judgment of the Delhi High court that said committing homosexual acts or gay acts or having unnatural sex, which in turn means sex with the same sex, is not illegal. This judgment in fact, repelled the famous or infamous, depending on which side you are on, Article 377 of the Indian constitution. For those of you who are not aware of what this Article 377 means, this is what it says:

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine

What the above rule means is that any sex act, apart from the so called natural act of sex between a man and woman and that too, penetration of the penis into the vagina of a woman is allowed and all other acts were immoral, unnatural and punishable. This rule has been in existence much before India gained her independence from the British and was formulated by the colonial British government. This is why homosexuality is illegal in most Asian countries that were British colonies once.

Article 377 actually says that any act other than penile penetration is illegal and the funny thing is, this means that all other acts like kissing, fellatio or any other sexual act are technically illegal. It is a different matter that this law was not followed or is not followed in totality because then we would have to build huge jails all over the country that can house a billion people! The law chose to penalize only homosexuals and lesbians instead. The very fact that homosexuality was illegal added more social stigma and insecurity to the gay community in a democratic country with diverse religions, castes and languages. Apparently, the country took a long time in coming to terms with its sexual diversities and its own conscience.

Now that this ruling has caused much jubilation among the gay community and the human rights groups and much angst among the far right political and religious groups, it remains to be seen now if our Indian boys will bring their boyfriends home to their parents and announce “This is the guy I want to spend the rest of my life with”!

Author: Rajiv Karran