- Saturday, March 01, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
India’s chief justice DY Chandrachud on Thursday (20) said same-sex relationships are not just physical ones but something more of a stable, emotional relationship.
He made the remark on the third day of the country’s supreme court hearing arguments on legalising same-sex marriages. A five-judge bench is hearing the arguments and it is being live-streamed on the website of the court as well as YouTube.
According to an NDTV report, Chandrachud said, “We see these [same-sex] relationships not just as physical relations but something more of a stable, emotional relationship,” asking “[Legalising same-sex marriage] requires us to redefine the evolving notion of marriage. Because is the existence of two spouses who belong to a binary gender a necessary requirement for marriage?”
The chief justice said that the law has evolved significantly in the last seven decades since the enactment of the Special Marriage Act in 1954. It provided a form of civil marriage for those who did not want to follow their personal laws.
Chandrachud said by decriminalising homosexuality, India has not just recognised treating relationships between consenting adults of the same order but also that people who are of the same sex would even be in stable relationships. He said this referring to the top court’s landmark 2018 order that decriminalised homosexuality.
The Narendra Modi government has been opposed to the reform and called petitions seeking legalisation of same-sex marriages represent “urban elitist views”. The court on Wednesday (19) said that the government has no data to show that it is an urban elitist concept.
The government has also said that the parliament is the right place to debate the matter and challenged the appeals, including by some gay couples, saying same-sex marriages are not “comparable with the Indian family unit concept of a husband, a wife and children”.
“The petitions, which merely reflect urban elitist views, cannot be compared with the appropriate legislature which reflects the views and voices of a far wider spectrum and expands across the country,” the government said in a filing to the apex court on Sunday (16).
At least 15 appeals have been filed with the court in recent months claiming that in the absence of legal recognition, many same-sex couples could not use their rights such as those linked to medical consent, pensions, club memberships, among others.
