A Black Day, Said the Lawyer, and He Was Right

Section 377 is a British law. The British wrote it in 1861, criminalizing "carnal intercourse against the order of nature," and planted it in the Indian Penal Code the way you’d plant a land mine—useful for harassment, useful for control, useful long after the reason you claimed to have for it stopped mattering. Britain itself abolished the equivalent provision in 1967. India’s Supreme Court just voted to keep it.

The Delhi High Court had done the right thing in 2009—ruled that consensual same-sex acts between adults weren’t criminal, that the law violated fundamental rights, that a secular democracy couldn’t keep using colonial religious morality as criminal code. Four years later the Supreme Court looked at that ruling and said: not our problem, let Parliament handle it. The effect was immediate reinstatement of a law under which you could face ten years in prison.

Arvind Narayan, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, called it a black day and said he was very angry about the regressive decision. The practical consequence isn’t primarily prosecution—Section 377 was rarely used for that. It’s most useful for exactly what it was always most useful for: police harassment, extortion, intimidation. The existence of a criminal statute turns every gay person into a potential target for anyone in uniform who wants leverage.

What makes this especially bitter is that India had been moving the other direction. The social climate in the cities had genuinely shifted over the past decade, and Bollywood—that strange barometer of what middle India can handle—had been carefully, sometimes clumsily, expanding what it was willing to show. Progress isn’t linear and a court can reverse years of it in a morning. That’s the thing I find hardest to sit with: how fast it can go backwards.

Activists are filing challenges. That process will take years. In the meantime, Section 377 is law again.