After a landmark ruling of the Delhi High Court in 2009, which decriminalised homosexuality, there has been a lot of dispiriting backing and forthing on the legal status and rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. In its latest serve, the Narendra Modi government has questioned the historic judgment of the Supreme Court in April, which recognised the transgender community as the third gender, gave them the right to raise families and transmit inheritance and directed the government to treat them as an OBC community with a right to the benefits flowing therefrom.
The government objects that the ruling suggests L, G and B are subsumed under the portmanteau alphabet T, while they are actually distinct. Indeed, the court had proceeded on the principle of exclusion on grounds of sexual orientation, rather than the specifics, but it may have opened the door to ambiguity. Besides, the government is procedurally correct in arguing that the National Commission for Backward Classes cannot be bypassed in the granting of OBC status. These objections may be in good faith but equally, they may be read as attempts to render the issue so unworkably complex that it can be safely put away behind a hedge of commissions and expert panels for years. The door to confusion was left open by the Supreme Court. It refused to decriminalise homosexual sex but now, it has established that homosexuals are equal citizens. They have complete privacy in the drawing room, but the police have free access to the bedroom.
