‘Full of sound and fury signifying nothing…’: Same sex marriage petitioners on SC verdict

Pooja Srivastava and Nibedita Dutta met on Facebook almost five years ago and have since married, but are forced to write ‘single’ on government documents which don’t provide for same-sex couples. They own an apparel business and live together but can’t nominate each other in health and life insurance policies. Getting the right to be considered equal partners will allow them to access a bouquet of rights that legal marriage provides. Srivastava says, “This verdict was very disheartening. It’s 2023 but the SC is giving such a judgment. They’ve left everything to a government which says our marriage is against culture, ethos, only for the elite… the government won’t do anything. This was just a two hour-long lecture.”“If SC has no power, why did they entertain these hearings for six months? They’ve not taken a single step forward,” she adds.“There has been no change [in our legal status] since Nibedita and I got married. Why is it a third party’s concern what my relation to my spouse is, or what inheritance I get from my family? They shouldn’t have entertained the case, because today, the people [against our marriage] are just happier. I am feeling less human,” she says.

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Maya Sharma, an LGBTQIA activist from Vadodara and a petitioner in the case, echoes the sentiment. “It’s full of sound and fury signifying nothing. What the judges said has already been stated in the NALSA verdict and the 2018 verdict, there is nothing new in it. The ball is back in the court of the central government and we all know what they feel about it,” says Sharma.

Sharma, who has been involved in activism for the past few decades, doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage but she believed that a favourable verdict would have been a strong step towards equality. “One of the judges said that this will adversely affect women. Are we not women? Don’t rights of lesbian women count?”asks Sharma, who lives with her partner in Vadodara.

Udit Sood took a 20-hour long flight from Los Angeles to hear the judgement on Tuesday, managed to reach the Supreme Court on time, but he wasn’t prepared for the disappointment. “I was optimistic. But this is devastating. In earlier judgments involving heterosexual couples, the Supreme Court said marriage is a fundamental right, one that is “integral” to the right to life. Now, with queer couples before it, the Court opted to reverse itself and effectively say ‘never mind, there’s no such right at all’,” says Sood.

Sood, who practises law in the US, wanted to highlight how queer citizens are compelled to leave the country because they are denied equal rights. Fellow petitioner, Saattvic, an economist settled in Canada, feels his decision to leave the country in 2020 stands vindicated now. It’s heartbreaking that my own country doesn’t take me as I am,” he says.

Malobika, a lesbian activist from Kolkata who is a veteran of over three decades in the queer activism field, however, chooses to focus on the positives. “As a petitioner, I am disappointed. But I want to focus on the fact that there were a lot of things that were highlighted in the verdict that had not been talked about before. The CJI, for the first time, spoke about the violence of natal family and said that there is not only one kind of family. He recognised that there is migration due to discrimination and persecution in the queer community. I feel this give us a platform to regroup and strategise our next course of action,” says Malabika.

Filmmaker Aditi Anand, who met her partner Susan Dias at a queer book club more than a decade ago, shifted cities, adopted a child and raise a dog together too. After hearing the verdict, Anand expresses her disappointment and hopes.”If we haven’t won today, it doesn’t mean we have lost, only that some battle is still to be fought,” she sums up.