Text has to breathe politics into the struggle on the ground. The latter is subject to the vagaries of majoritarianism, populism where democracy is indifferent or callous about margins and minorities. While Nariman explores the conceptual historicity of the gay world, Chandrachud outlines a conceptual examination of the lifeworld of homosexuality. For Nariman, the judgment becomes an exorcism of memory, a return to the normality of citizenship. His emphasis is on the creativity of the Constitution.To a lay reader, what is fascinating is the variety of traditions they invoke and appeal.Nariman evokes a different world, a world of memories, the tragic world of Oscar Wilde, a world that celebrates puns and language. Chandrachud is more imperious and interrogative as a scholar, providing a linguistic and conceptual analysis of the legal terrain. Each plays a soloist of law before the logic of the judgment as a symphony brings them together. A court with a lame duck Chief Justice is even more intriguing.
For example, to be earnest in the language of the London underworld was to be gay, and Wilde wickedly made it the innocuous title of his play The Importance of being Earnest.. The judge’s mask is off and one sees a set of human beings struggling with each other. Justice Misra is appealing to the whole realm of law and he opens out with a fusillade of China xps shower tray Suppliers quotations from Goethe and Schopenhauer. It begins as sodomy, is criminalised in Victorian England and colonial India, and was long seen as a pathology, a mental illness. Sadly, it is not its judgments that the audience is interested in, but the factionalism within. The world is opening up to a new imagination. To the first triangle embodying the French Revolution’s slogans, Misra adds a second insulation, a cocoon for private space where a man not only has a right to be alone but where sexual intimacy, choice and freedom is viable.
The five-judge bench in the Navtej Singh Johar case did just that: it decriminalised homosexuality in India. Yet what one misses in newspaper reports is an analysis. Nariman’s act of exorcism is poetic and scholarly as he traces how homosexuality goes through the grid of sin, crime and illness.The question is how does one look at a judgment like this? The history is already in the decision and the headlines become the reason for a festival across India.Nariman’s exorcism begins by showing how the stigma of homosexuality had to run the gauntlet of a Judeo-Christian world, pass through Victorian puntarism, and rid itself Macaulaylite vestiges of the Indian Penal Code. The timing seems immaculate for a historic judgment, a chance to go beyond acrimony. Three judgments in particular stand out, Misra’s piece, one of his last as CJ, and the accompanying essays of Rohinton Nariman and Dhananjaya Chandrachud.Chandrachud brings a different mastery of law and maps the terrain of such a possibility by interrogating concepts and examining linguistic politics behind every keyword. LGBTQ community members celebrate after the Supreme Court verdict which decriminalises consensual gay sex, in Mumbai. The LGBT community needs this space for freedom and dreaming to live with dignity.Each judge brings a different style of analysis to the challenge. It is when it is purged of all these stigmas that the gay world becomes ready for the entitlements of citizenship. For Misra, constitutional morality, unlike social morality, is plural and inclusive, not subject to the vagaries of a brute demographic majority. Scholarship and jurisprudence has to meet politics. Chandrachud virtually conducts a conceptual pilgrimage through the law which is worth imitating. The decision becomes the event and the text, a set of quotable quotes. LGBT freedom is not the goal, but the test of this creativity. Between the rigour of these experiments he creates a poignant moment where Justice Leila Seth talks about the gay world of her son Vikaram. For Nariman, there is an evocation of memory, of stories of Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing, of the tragedies that littered the long career of law. For Macaulay, homosexuality was so horrendous a fact that Macaulay did not want to discuss it. Each begins as a strand, becomes a braid. Dignity becomes a new key term signalling this transformation, where acts of sexuality, once seen as bestial and unnatural, acquire dignity, the essential skin of humanity.
The challenge now is for activism and institutions to recreate this world in every nukkad. For Misra, it is this dream of a vibrant transformational Constitution that is critical.What the court does is to exorcise a world of treatises but the life of the book has to encounter the book of life. Quotations are a style of citing genealogy and the CJI’s genealogy as a constitutionalist is clear. (Photo: PTI) A court at war with itself is already an object of interest and curiosity. A constitutional morality is a corrective, cybernetic force that makes transformationalism possible. He makes two arguments that are central in this age of majoritarian and demographic logic.
The power of the analysis lies in its poignancy and poetry. Indu Malhotra’s final statement — that the court owes an apology to the LGBT community — caps a stellar performance with an act of generosity. Even a discussion of the gay world became polluting to the father of Indian colonial education. For Misra, the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” has to be reworked twice: once as an architectonic of public space, once as an insulation of private space.While echoing his enthusiasm of LGBT reform, what Misra is creating is an edifice for privacy, seeing privacy needs a stronger sense of home and homecoming. The long and desperate battle of the LGBT community has virtually come home. The outlawing of Section 377, for Misra, is a goodbye signature, an attempt to state his faith in the Constitution and its dynamism. For Misra, the LGBT community is almost a pretext to validate the court as a text. First, he differentiates the vitality of constitutional morality from social morality as the lowest common denominator polity. One knows Dipak Misra is retiring in a few weeks and Ranjan Gogoi has already been anointed. What was the logic behind the law? Did the quality of argument rise to the decision?This is more an analysis of the text of the judgment. The five-judge bench in the Navtej Singh Johar case did just that: it decriminalised homosexuality in India