On 2 July, the Delhi High Court broke with nearly 150 years of legal precedent, reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalized same-sex relations as ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’.
The Code was introduced by the British colonial government in 1860. ‘Its very language is an anachronism, and it has no place in contemporary India,’ says Anjali Gopalan, director of the Naz Foundation, the Delhi-based NGO which brought the case against Section 377 to court. The law had not been used to prosecute homosexual sex for decades, but it did allow – and even encouraged – harassment of sexual minorities in the country.
