A court ruling breaks with a colonial law
Delhi decriminalises homosexuality across the country for the first time: a historic ruling with repercussions to this day.
On 2 July 2009, the Delhi High Court handed down a ruling that changed the legal situation for millions of people in India. In the case of Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi, Judges Ajit Prakash Shah and S. Muralidhar declared Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code unconstitutional insofar as it criminalised consensual sexual acts between adults.
Section 377 dated from the British colonial era and punished "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" with up to life imprisonment. In practice the law mainly affected gay men, trans people and other sexual minorities, and it repeatedly served the police and authorities as a pretext for blackmail, assault and discrimination. The case had been brought by the Naz Foundation, an organisation working on HIV prevention. It argued that the law drove particularly vulnerable groups into isolation and so made access to information and medical care more difficult.
The court based its ruling on Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution: Section 377 violated the right to equality, the prohibition of discrimination and the right to life and dignity. The judges held that sexual orientation was analogous to the category of sex and therefore could not be a basis for unequal treatment.
The story of the ruling remained turbulent. In 2013 the Supreme Court overturned the decision and fully reinstated Section 377. Only in 2018, in the case of Navtej Singh Johar, did a five-judge bench finally decriminalise same-sex relationships in India, explicitly drawing on the reasoning of 2009. The Delhi ruling has since been regarded as the legal cornerstone of this long road to equality.