LGBTQI+ Rights and Social Attitudes in India: A Historical Perspective

India is home to one of the world’s oldest and most diverse cultures – a civilization that, centuries before British rule, acknowledged gender and sexual diversity in its sacred texts, temple art, and social customs. Yet for over 150 years, a single colonial law turned that history on its head, criminalizing same-sex relations and pushing millions of LGBTQI+ people into the shadows. Understanding how India got here – and how it has slowly moved toward greater equality – requires looking at the tension between constitutional ideals, colonial legal inheritance, and the hard-won victories of grassroots activism.

Constitutional promises and the reality of inequality 🔗

India’s Constitution, adopted in 1950, is built on a foundation of equality and non-discrimination. Article 14 guarantees the right to equality before the law, Article 15 prohibits discrimination on specified grounds, and Article 21 protects the right to life and personal liberty. These provisions, on their face, apply to every citizen regardless of identity.

But for sexual minorities in India, the gap between constitutional text and lived reality has historically been enormous. LGBTQI+ individuals faced – and continue to face – discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, and family life. Social stigma, rooted in deeply conservative norms around heterosexual marriage and gender roles, has long rendered queer identities either invisible or shameful. The law did not simply reflect this stigma; for decades, it actively reinforced it. As the Georgetown Law O’Neill Institute notes, criminalization forced LGBTQI+ people to live closeted lives that also cut them off from equal access to healthcare, worsening outcomes for conditions like HIV/AIDS. The constitutional guarantees that were meant to protect all citizens were, in practice, being denied to an entire community.

Transgender rights: a separate but connected struggle 🔗

It is important to recognize that the LGBTQI+ umbrella in India encompasses distinct communities with different histories. Hijras and transgender people, for instance, have a centuries-long presence in Indian culture, yet faced severe social marginalization in the modern era. A significant legal milestone came in 2014, when the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in NALSA v. Union of India recognized transgender individuals as a third gender and affirmed their fundamental rights, including entitlement to reservations in education and employment. However, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019, while a formal recognition, was widely criticized by activists for providing weaker protections – for instance, prescribing lower penalties for sexual violence against transgender women than those applicable to cisgender women.

The colonial legacy of Section 377 🔗

To understand the modern struggle for LGBTQI+ rights in India, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code is the unavoidable starting point. The provision was introduced by British colonial authorities in 1862, criminalizing “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” – language that, though it never explicitly mentioned homosexuality, was routinely used to prosecute gay men. The law carried penalties ranging from a fine to life imprisonment.

The origins of Section 377 were not organic to Indian society. As scholars have documented, British colonial authorities intended the code partly to shape colonial subjects according to Christian moral frameworks, linking same-sex behavior with criminality and perversion. Victorian-era European discourse tied homosexuality to bestiality and child abuse – associations that the penal code codified and exported across the British Empire. Crucially, Section 377 was not an imposition on a culture that had always condemned homosexuality. Pre-colonial India, in fact, had a more complex and in some respects more tolerant relationship with sexual and gender diversity, evidenced in texts like the Kamasutra and the homoerotic iconography of medieval temple art.

After independence in 1947, India retained the Indian Penal Code essentially intact. Section 377 remained on the books for more than 70 years post-independence, used routinely by police to harass, blackmail, and extort gay men and transgender individuals. The law did not need to result in many convictions to cause widespread harm – the mere threat of arrest under Section 377 was enough to keep LGBTQI+ people silent and vulnerable.

The ideological battle over “Indian culture” 🔗

One of the most persistent arguments used to defend Section 377 was cultural: that homosexuality was a “Western import,” alien to Indian values. This claim was deployed by Hindu nationalist groups, conservative religious organizations, and even some secular nationalists. The irony, as scholars have pointed out, is that it was Section 377 itself that was the colonial import – a Victorian-era law imposed on a society that had its own, more nuanced traditions around sexuality and gender. The argument that criminalizing homosexuality was somehow anti-colonial was, in effect, the reverse of the historical truth.

The rise of LGBTQI+ activism in India 🔗

Organized LGBTQI+ visibility in India began taking shape in the 1980s, driven in large part by two converging forces: individual courage and the HIV/AIDS crisis. In 1984, journalist Ashok Row Kavi became the first person to publicly come out as gay in India, a groundbreaking act in a society where homosexuality was not only criminalized but almost entirely unspoken in public life. Row Kavi would go on to found Bombay Dost in 1990 – India’s first LGBT magazine – and then the Humsafar Trust in 1994, one of India’s largest and most active LGBT rights organizations, which provided counseling, healthcare, and advocacy services to LGBTQ communities in Mumbai.

The AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan and “Less Than Gay” 🔗

The HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s gave rise to a wave of activism that directly intersected with LGBTQI+ rights. The AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (ABVA) – the AIDS Anti-Discrimination Movement – began working in AIDS advocacy in India in 1989. In 1991, seven members of ABVA published Less Than Gay: A Citizens’ Report on the Status of Homosexuality in India – the first report to publicly document the status of queer people in India and the discrimination they faced. The 70-page report called for the repeal of Section 377 and the discriminatory provisions of the Army, Navy, and Air Force Acts. When it was presented at the Press Club of India, journalists were reportedly so uncomfortable that not a single question was asked – a telling measure of how taboo the subject was at the time.

On August 11, 1992, ABVA organized what is recognized as the first public protest against police harassment of LGBT people in India, following police raids targeting men at Central Park in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Over 500 people joined the demonstration, including democratic and civil rights groups – a significant turnout for a cause that was barely spoken of publicly. Two years later, in 1994, ABVA filed the first Public Interest Litigation (PIL) challenging the constitutionality of Section 377. Though the petition was eventually dismissed in 2001 after losing momentum, it was the first formal legal challenge to the law and it set the stage for everything that followed.

Building community infrastructure in the 1990s 🔗

The mid-to-late 1990s saw the emergence of dedicated LGBTQ+ organizations across India’s major cities. Groups like the Humsafar Trust in Mumbai (1994), Sangama in Bangalore (1999), and SAATHII in Chennai (2000) built community infrastructure, offered advocacy, and created safe spaces for LGBTQI+ individuals at a time when such spaces were nearly nonexistent. Many of these organizations began with a focus on HIV prevention and sexual health – a pragmatic entry point that allowed them to work openly at a time when broader gay rights advocacy was still extremely risky.

In 1999, Kolkata held India’s first ever Gay Pride Parade – called Calcutta Rainbow Pride – with just 15 attendees. Small as it was, it marked a symbolic turning point: a public, visible declaration of queer identity in an Indian city. That same year, the Delhi-based Campaign for Lesbian Rights (CALERI) released a manifesto called Lesbian Emergence, drawing attention to the particular invisibility of queer women within both mainstream society and the nascent LGBTQI+ movement itself.

The legal turning point: from 2001 to 2018 🔗

The sustained legal campaign against Section 377 began in earnest in 2001, when the Naz Foundation – an NGO originally focused on HIV/AIDS work – filed a PIL in the Delhi High Court challenging Section 377 as a violation of fundamental rights. The High Court ruled in 2009 that Section 377 violated the right to privacy under Article 21 as well as the rights to equal treatment and non-discrimination under Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution – a historic victory. However, the Supreme Court overturned this judgment in 2013, reinstating criminalization and ruling that only Parliament had the authority to change the law.

The 2013 reversal galvanized the community further. In 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously declared the right to privacy a fundamental right and explicitly stated that sexual orientation lies at the core of fundamental rights. This paved the way for the landmark ruling of September 6, 2018, in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, in which a five-judge constitutional bench unanimously struck down the provisions of Section 377 that criminalized consensual adult same-sex relations. Justice Indu Malhotra’s words from the bench captured the moment’s historical weight: an apology was owed to members of the LGBTQI+ community for the ostracization and persecution they faced due to society’s ignorance.

Where does India stand today? 🔗

The decriminalization of homosexuality was a monumental step, but legal change and social change do not move at the same speed. LGBT youth in India still face widespread bullying in schools, discrimination in housing and employment, and a lack of formal legal protections for same-sex partnerships. Same-sex marriage remains unrecognized – the Supreme Court declined to legalize it in 2023, leaving the matter to Parliament. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019, while a formal acknowledgment, has been criticized by transgender activists for falling short of genuine protection.

Social attitudes are shifting, particularly among urban youth, and Pride events in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Bengaluru have grown dramatically in size and visibility. But activists are clear that legal victories, while essential, are only one part of the struggle. Changing educational curricula, addressing caste and class intersections within the LGBTQI+ community, and building genuine institutional protections remain unfinished work. The movement that began with a 70-page report released to a silent press room in 1991 has come a long way – but the distance still to travel is significant.

What do you think? The Indian Constitution has long promised equality to all citizens – yet it took over 70 years after independence to decriminalize same-sex relations. What does that gap tell us about the relationship between formal law and social change? And given that decriminalization is not the same as full equality, what do you think are the most urgent legal or social changes still needed for LGBTQI+ people in India today?

References

1. https://juriscentre.com/2023/10/13/lgbtq-rights-and-section-377-of-indian-penal-code-1860/
2. https://oneill.law.georgetown.edu/history-owes-apology-to-the-lgbt-community-supreme-court-of-india-reads-down-colonial-era-section-377/
3. https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/24/section-377-history-young-lgbt-indians-need-concrete-policies-protect-them-bullying
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377
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6. https://www.thequint.com/explainers/lgbt-queer-rights-india-section-377-homosexuality-history
7. https://theprint.in/politics/indias-first-and-oldest-gay-activist-uses-a-brand-of-hindutva-to-fight-377/85919/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humsafar_Trust
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history_in_India
10. https://qz.com/india/1379620/section-377-a-timeline-of-indias-battle-for-gay-rights
11. https://socio.health/gender-and-society/history-of-lgbtq-movements-india/
12. https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/The-History-and-Activism-of-LGBTQ-Community-in-India-20180909-0009.html
13. https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/section-377-expanding-lgbt-rights-in-india