“The BCI denies any role of fundamental rights in its Resolution, instead characterising marriage equality as a political decision. This shows their heinous indifference towards the reality of queer and trans persons living as second-class citizens in our country.”
Student groups from 36 law colleges across the country have issued a statement condemning the Bar Council of India’s resolution asking the Supreme Court not to take a decision in the marriage equality case, and instead leave such a decision to the legislature.
“More than 99.9% of people of the country are opposed to the idea of same-sex marriage in our country. The vast majority believes that any decision of the SC in the petitioners’ favour on this issue will be treated to be against the culture and socio-religious structure of our country,” the BCI resolution had said. It did not explain where it got this statistic.
The student groups, in their statement, have said that the BCI’s resolution “is ignorant, harmful, and antithetical to our Constitution and the spirit of inclusive social life. It attempts to tell queer persons that the law and the legal profession have no place for them.”
The BCI, the students argue, is going against its own mandate in passing resolutions of this kind.
“The BCI denies any role of fundamental rights in its Resolution, instead characterising marriage equality as a political decision. This shows their heinous indifference towards the reality of queer and trans persons living as second-class citizens in our country,” the statement continues.
The students have also questioned the BCI’s use of statistics:
“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. The usage of hateful rhetoric is consistent throughout the Resolution; the BCI feels no shame in calling demands for marriage equality ‘morally compunctive’ and ‘a social experiment’. We condemn this hateful speech in the strongest possible terms.”
Far from pushing Indian traditions, the statement says, the BCI is actually expounding a colonial perspective on marriage and relationships:
“Equally ignorant is the BCI’s unsupported assertion that marriage has always been a union between ‘biological’ men and women based on procreation. This is a colonial reading of Indian history, culture, and civilisation – there is diverse evidence of queer love and marriage existing in various forms across Indian cultures since ancient times. The BCI ignores this evidence. Having appointed itself, in another overreach of power, as a ‘mouthpiece of the common men’, the BCI demonstrates how it is in fact a mouthpiece for a very specific class of men who have the privilege to make hegemonic statements on our culture without any form of accountability. Further, the law is settled on the protection of non-typical, non-procreative familial unions. By asserting marriage as a vessel for procreation, the BCI fails to realise that the biological faculty of procreation cannot be lorded over citizens as a prerequisite for fundamental rights in a democratic and rules-based society.”
The students have also made a formal representation to the BCI, explaining why they think this resolution is harmful.