Chief Justice Dipak Misra, reading from the lead judgment, stated that the law was ‘irrational, indefensible, and manifestly arbitrary.’ The five-judge constitutional bench was unanimous. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, enacted under British rule in 1861, criminalized ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature.’ The court did not merely decriminalize; it affirmed fundamental rights. The judgment declared that homosexuals possessed an inalienable constitutional right to autonomy, intimacy, and identity. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was ‘deeply offensive to dignity and self-determination.’
The legal battle spanned decades. An earlier 2009 Delhi High Court ruling decriminalizing homosexuality was overturned by a two-judge Supreme Court bench in 2013, a decision widely criticized as a ‘constitutional travesty.’ The 2018 verdict corrected that error, relying heavily on the transformative power of the Indian Constitution’s guarantees of equality, liberty, and life. The judges invoked the ‘constitutional morality’ over social morality, noting that majoritarian views could not dictate fundamental rights.
A common misunderstanding is that the court ‘legalized homosexuality.’ Its ruling was more specific: it decriminalized consensual sexual acts between adults in private. It left Section 377 intact to govern non-consensual acts and bestiality. The decision did not automatically confer rights to marriage or civil union; it removed the threat of prosecution, a tool often used for harassment and extortion.
The immediate effect was the removal of criminal liability for an estimated 104 million Indians. The ruling sparked celebrations in major cities and created a legal foundation for subsequent battles over adoption, inheritance, and anti-discrimination laws. It represented the most significant judicial advance for LGBTQ+ rights in the history of the world’s largest democracy, dismantling a Victorian-era apparatus of state-sponsored prejudice.