Student groups from 36 Indian law colleges have collectively issued a statement condemning the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) resolution against marriage equality.
On April 23, 2023, the Bar Council of India (BCI) passed a resolution on the ongoing marriage equality petitions, urging the Supreme Court to abdicate its role and defer the matter to the Parliament instead.
On this, student groups, queer students and allies have issued a statement saying that the resolution is “ignorant, harmful, and antithetical to our Constitution and the spirit of inclusive social life.”
More than 600 students from various queer student groups have taken part in this including Queer Collective and Philosophy Club from National Law University Delhi, Queer Alliance, Savitri Phule Ambedkar Caravan and Feminist Alliance from National Law School of India University; Queer Collective and Students’ Federation of India from OP Jindal Global University and many more.
What does the statement say?
“As future members of the Bar, it has been alienating and hurtful to see our seniors engage in such hateful rhetoric… The BCI ought to respect the letter and spirit of the Advocates Act, 1961, which clearly defines the body’s mandate based on its regulatory function. Nothing in the Act, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, empowers the BCI to pass comments on sub judice matters,” the statement read.
During the hearing in the Supreme Court, both petitioners and the central government cited the 2018 landmark Navtej Johar verdict by the Supreme Court that struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), decriminalising sexual relationships between consenting adults of the same sex.
In their statement, the law students mentioned that the ongoing case concerns the recognition of fundamental rights (to equality, freedom, and privacy) that queer persons already have under the Constitution.
“Our Constitution is a counterweight to majoritarianism, religious morality, and unjust public opinion. Constitutional morality dictates that marriage equality must not be made subject to the wishes of a casteist, cis-heteronormative, and patriarchal society… To subject fundamental rights to societal decisions is to betray the vision of morality our Constitution commits us to; it is to betray the Constitution itself,” it said.
The statement added that the BCI’s statement implying that marriage has always been a union between ‘biological’ men and women based on procreation is false and ignorant.
“Having cited no real authority, the BCI blatantly concocts statistics of ‘99.9%’ of Indians opposing same-sex marriage, to run the worn-out theory that queer persons constitute a ‘miniscule minority’. This has already been rejected by the Supreme Court in Navtej Singh Johar,” it added further.
The legal recognition of same-sex marriage in India is currently being discussed in a batch of petitions and has entered into the sixth day of hearing today, Thursday, April 27.
