Is narendra modi gay

Why the Narendra Modi government is opposed to same-sex marriage The Centre has argued that the matter is best left to Parliament to decide upon, but the Supreme Court feels the issues raised by petitions on same-sex marriages are "seminal" Listen to Story Advertisement. Indian PM Narendra Modi's government resists recognition for same-sex marriage - court papers Gay sex was decriminalised in but the topic of same-sex marriage remains highly sensitive, with.

During nearly a decade in power, Indian leader Narendra Modi and his ruling BJP party have been keen to shake off India’s colonial baggage, renaming streets and cities and championing an India. #LGBT #QueerPrideParadeThePrint's Shahbaz Ansar covers the first Delhi Queer Pride Parade that took place after the scrapping Section Hundreds of people. But the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has staunchly opposed same-sex marriage, and said that any change was up to parliament, not the courts.

The last ten years have witnessed the gradual collapse of democracy and constitutionalism in India. In its first term —19 , the Narendra Modi government went about incrementally dismantling each institution meant for establishing executive accountability, thereby killing the Constitution with a thousand cuts. Indeed, given the spate of censorship, preventive detentions, internet bans, invocation of sedition and terrorism charges against all forms of dissent and the general climate of curtailed liberty that India has witnessed in the last decade, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is going through an " undeclared emergency.

Where do LGBT rights figure in all this? There is some basis for asking this question. Illiberal and autocratic governments in different parts of the world have been making attacks on LGBT rights " a central pillar of their political agendas. Similarly, Human Rights Watch, the eminent human rights organisation, notes how targeting LGBT rights can be seen everywhere as part of the " authoritarian playbook.

What gives further reason to pursue this question is that in October , the Supreme Court of India turned down a plea for legal recognition of same-sex marriage — something that the union government had opposed. As this cursory survey shows, there have been both legal wins and losses. But as I hope to show below, whether positive or negative, LGBT experiences with the state in the last decade are peripheral to the crisis of constitutionalism sketched above.

Below, I contextualise the wins and the losses and discuss why LGBT rights in India are not "under attack" as they have been under authoritarian governments elsewhere. The Court held that hijras a traditional male-to-female transgender category had the right to identify as the "third gender" for all official purposes and that all transgender persons had the right to choose how they wanted to be identified. The judges directed the government to make provisions for the legal recognition of trans persons in official documents and recognize the group as a "socially and economically backward class" for purposes of reservation to government education and employment for their social advancement.

This was a surprising verdict since just four months earlier, in Koushal v Naz Foundation , a different bench of the Court had reinstated the criminalization of sodomy by overturning a Delhi High Court judgement. It contradicted its own much-hyped preference for "self-identification" by shoving hijras into the third gender category many of them identify as women and introducing a psychological test for the state to confirm their identification.

The judgement has been rightly criticised for its implicit pathologization of trans-ness. These, as many have noted, are signs of a populist court that is eager to be seen as doing justice to the downtrodden rather than guarding against executive excesses, arguably the main role of a constitutional court. In a wordy judgement of pages, a five-judge bench of the Court found the blanket criminalization of sodomy by section of the Indian Penal Code to be unconstitutional and read it down to exclude adult consensual sex in private from its scope.

While the verdict was sound and much overdue, once again, it was not the best example of a constitutional court doing its job.

Talking to a news

As lawyer Nizam Pasha astutely noted: "section was just a low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked by a court increasingly conscious of its public image and the media reportage of its proceedings. But instead of getting sidetracked into the structural problems ailing the Indian Supreme Court, let us stay with the main concern of this piece: LGBT rights.

What is it about this issue that made it a "low-hanging fruit" for a populist court? Relatedly, why are LGBT rights not under attack in India as they are elsewhere, despite there being an authoritarian government in power that professes a socially conservative ideology? Part of the answer lies in the nature of demands made on the state.

Since its inception in the early s, LGBT activism pursued the singular goal of decriminalisation of sodomy. Towards that goal, it drew attention to how the criminalization of sexual acts that were "against the order of nature" demeaned homosexual personhood. To be sure, "being" gay or lesbian had never been a crime, the way membership to certain ethnic groups had been under the now-repealed Criminal Tribes Act, Nor was the anti-sodomy provision actively and systematically enforced, the way similar laws had been used against the "vice of homosexuality" in other parts of the world.

Nonetheless, by foregrounding the symbolic harms suffered by the homosexual subject by the very existence of this legal provision, the activists succeeded in making a case against it. Symbolic harms can be easier to remedy when compared to structural ones. Often, just some affirming words or even a lapel pin can do the job. Legal cases are characteristically of narrow scope. But in this case, the wider activism that supported the court case also had a narrow focus.