State-Sanctioned Discrimination Against LGBTQI+ Individuals in India

India has made several headline-grabbing legal strides for LGBTQI+ rights – most notably the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that decriminalized homosexuality by reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. But a legal milestone and lived equality are two very different things. For millions of queer and transgender Indians, the state is not simply an absent protector – it is, at times, an active perpetrator of discrimination and violence. From police stations to courtrooms to government welfare offices, LGBTQI+ individuals routinely encounter a system that denies them basic rights and dignity. This post examines three dimensions of that state-sanctioned discrimination: the gap between legal recognition and social reality, the persistent problem of police harassment, and the glaring absence of rights for same-sex couples.

Legal recognition versus social reality 🔗

On paper, India’s legal framework for LGBTQI+ rights has evolved considerably. The Supreme Court struck down the criminalization of consensual same-sex relations in 2018 in the landmark Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India ruling. In 2014, the court recognized transgender people as a third gender in NALSA v. Union of India. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act was passed in 2019, and the Indian Penal Code was replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita in 2024 with gender-neutral language. These are not small achievements. Yet the distance between what the law says and what queer and trans people actually experience is vast.

The 2019 Transgender Rights Act, for instance, was expected to provide a safety net for trans individuals. But as the Washington Blade reported in 2024, crimes against trans people have continued to rise despite the legislation. Government welfare schemes have also failed this population. Official records show that trans beneficiaries under national housing programs are barely counted – Ladakh, for example, registered zero trans beneficiaries across all financial years of one major scheme, despite having six trans residents on record. This is not an oversight; it reflects how administrative systems exclude those who do not fit into assumed gender and family categories.

Property rights, family benefits, inheritance, and medical decision-making all hinge on legally recognized relationships. Since same-sex unions carry no legal status, LGBTQI+ individuals find themselves locked out of these entitlements by default. According to a Citizens for Justice and Peace analysis, queer people are susceptible to violence not just from police but from their own families, and the state frequently sides with family interests over individual safety – including advising queer people to return to abusive households rather than helping them escape.

Access to healthcare and social services 🔗

The exclusion from legal recognition has direct consequences for healthcare access. A study by the Swasti Health Resource Centre across five Indian states found that more than half of gay men who experienced physical violence, sexual abuse, and emotional trauma were living with their families – often without being out – compared to those in more supportive environments. Criminalization historically made it harder for gay men to seek treatment for sexually transmitted infections without risking exposure or arrest. Even after decriminalization, the stigma embedded in health systems has not disappeared. Patients are routinely turned away, misgendered, or treated as curiosities rather than people with legitimate medical needs. These are not individual failures; they are the result of a system that never designed its services with queer or trans people in mind.

Police harassment and misuse of power 🔗

Perhaps the most immediate and visceral form of state violence that LGBTQI+ individuals in India face comes from law enforcement. Police harassment, extortion, blackmail, and physical abuse have been documented extensively and persist long after the legal changes that should have ended them.

The record here is damning. Testimonies provided to the Delhi High Court in 2007 documented how a gay man abducted by police in Delhi was sexually assaulted by officers for several days and forced to sign a degrading “confession.” A report by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in 2018 found that 92 percent of transgender individuals had faced physical or verbal abuse, with law enforcement officials identified as frequent perpetrators. A 2016 study by the National Institute of Epidemiology similarly identified police and law enforcement agencies as primary sources of violence against transgender persons.

After the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that temporarily reinstated Section 377, the activist group Kavi’s Humsafar Trust reported that two-fifths of homosexuals in India had faced blackmail – with police using the threat of prosecution as leverage. Even after the 2018 decriminalization ruling, police continued to harass and attack LGBTQIA+ individuals and pressure them toward conversion “treatment.” Compliance with the Supreme Court’s directives on protection has remained low.

Structural impunity and lack of sensitization 🔗

A key reason this abuse persists is what LGBTQIA+ activists describe as a fundamental lack of awareness within police forces about gender, sexuality, and identity. Officers frequently treat LGBTQI+ complaints as personal or moral matters rather than law enforcement issues, filtering decisions through personal bias rather than legal obligation. Trans people who attempt to file First Information Reports (FIRs) routinely encounter dismissiveness, hostility, and deflection. When the very institution meant to protect them becomes a source of harm, queer individuals have no credible channel for seeking justice.

The Wire documented a specific case at Narayanpur police station in Kolkata, where officers were accused of harassing a gay man based on his gender identity as recently as 2020. Most states, despite NHRC recommendations, have not taken steps to sensitize law enforcement. NGOs have stepped in to fill this gap, but the problem remains structural and systemic. As the People’s Union for Civil Liberties documented in its report on sexuality minorities, police harassment is not incidental – it builds on and is reinforced by broader societal attitudes that treat LGBTQI+ people as less deserving of human rights protections.

In 2024, incidents continued to surface. A trans woman was groped by a Railway Protection Force officer at a metro station in Kolkata under the guise of a “gender check.” A trans person in Telangana was killed by a mob while authorities cleared them of any wrongdoing only after they had died from injuries. These are not isolated incidents – they are part of a pattern in which state actors either perpetrate violence directly or create the conditions under which it thrives with impunity.

Lack of comprehensive rights for same-sex couples 🔗

One of the most consequential forms of state-sanctioned discrimination in India is the legal non-recognition of same-sex couples. This affects every dimension of life shared between two people – finances, healthcare, housing, children, and death.

In October 2023, the Supreme Court of India declined to legalize same-sex marriage in the landmark Supriyo v. Union of India case, leaving the matter to Parliament. In a 3-2 verdict, the court held that there was no fundamental right to marriage under the Constitution and that rewriting marriage law would require Parliament to act. The ruling crushed the hopes of the dozens of couples who had petitioned the court over years, including many who had been together for decades. As one lawyer representing petitioners put it, queer couples who are already families and pillars of society are being denied the dignity and rights they are due.

The cascade of rights denied 🔗

When a same-sex couple’s union carries no legal recognition, the consequences are far-reaching. As NPR reported, same-sex couples in India cannot jointly own property, open joint bank accounts, inherit from a partner without a will, or nominate their partner as a beneficiary without navigating legal systems designed exclusively for heterosexual married couples. They cannot make medical decisions for an incapacitated partner. In a medical emergency, a partner has no legal standing – family members, no matter how estranged, take precedence.

Adoption is another sharp-edged exclusion. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights told the Supreme Court that allowing same-sex couples to adopt would endanger children – a position that has no evidentiary basis but carries enormous institutional weight. Regulations by the Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA) explicitly barred same-sex couples from joint adoption. While Chief Justice Chandrachud found this violated the constitutional right to equality, the majority opinion did not adopt this view, leaving the prohibition intact. Currently, Indian law only recognizes one member of a same-sex couple as a parent – either through birth or single-parent adoption – meaning the other partner has no legal relationship to the child they may be raising jointly.

Employment and retirement benefits compound the picture further. Pension benefits, insurance nominations, provident fund entitlements, and gratuity are all structured around legal spousal relationships. A partner of twenty years has no more claim to these benefits than a stranger. In February 2024, the Ministry of Finance clarified that persons in same-sex live-in relationships could open joint bank accounts and name each other as beneficiaries – a modest administrative concession, but one that underscores how far this community still sits from full equality.

Parliament’s silence and the government’s position 🔗

The Supreme Court’s referral to Parliament places marriage equality in a politically hostile arena. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government actively opposed the recognition of same-sex marriage before the court, arguing that it would threaten Indian family values. In 2023, the Law Commission also excluded same-sex marriages from its draft uniform civil code. Religious lobbies – Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Sikh – have lined up in opposition. With no political will to legislate and a court that has declined to act, same-sex couples remain in legal limbo, their relationships visible to the state only when it needs to deny them something.

Legal scholars have described the court’s approach in the marriage equality case as “strategic avoidance” – acknowledging the discrimination faced by queer people while declining to name the laws causing it as unconstitutional. As constitutional law researchers at the IACL-IADC Blog noted, the court showed deep reluctance to declare marriage laws discriminatory despite accepting that queer couples face systematic exclusion. This is itself a form of state inaction – and inaction in the face of documented discrimination is its own kind of sanction.

The state as both protector and perpetrator 🔗

What makes state-sanctioned discrimination particularly insidious is that it operates on multiple levels simultaneously. It does not always look like a law explicitly targeting queer people. Sometimes it looks like a police officer who ignores a trans person’s complaint. Sometimes it looks like an adoption regulation that assumes only heterosexual couples can be good parents. Sometimes it looks like a welfare scheme that simply never counted trans people as beneficiaries. Sometimes it looks like a Supreme Court bench that acknowledges discrimination but refuses to call it unconstitutional.

India’s LGBTQI+ community has won real legal victories through decades of activism and litigation. But as the Policy Forum analysis of India’s legal failures argued, laws like Section 377 created a climate in which violence and persecution were carried out with impunity – and dismantling one law does not automatically dismantle the attitudes it institutionalized. According to 2024 research, 79 percent of gay men and 44 percent of bisexual men have experienced verbal abuse or physical violence. People who are openly out are five times more likely to face violence than those who are not. These numbers do not describe a community protected by the state. They describe one that is still, in many ways, navigating a system built to exclude them.

True equality for LGBTQI+ individuals in India will require more than decriminalization or court rulings. It requires police forces trained to protect rather than persecute, legislation that extends the full bundle of rights enjoyed by married couples to same-sex partners, and a welfare state designed to include – rather than systematically overlook – gender and sexual minorities.

What do you think? If India’s Parliament were to debate a same-sex marriage bill today, what arguments do you think should carry the most weight in that conversation – constitutional rights, social values, or comparative international experience? And how should a state be held accountable when its laws protect people in theory but its institutions continue to harm them in practice?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_India
2. https://www.washingtonblade.com/2024/09/24/anti-transgender-discrimination-violence-in-india-persists/
3. https://cjp.org.in/indias-lgbtqia-struggle-beyond-legal-victories-battle-for-true-equality-remains/
4. https://article-14.com/post/4-years-after-sc-decriminalised-homosexuality-police-violence-against-lgbtqia-people-hasn-t-stopped-629820915541e
5. https://thewire.in/lgbtqia/police-violence-against-lgtbqia-people-in-kolkata-highlights-need-for-sensitisation
6. https://feministlawarchives.pldindia.org/wp-content/uploads/sexual-minorities.pdf
7. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/indias-supreme-court-declines-to-legalize-same-sex-marriage-saying-its-up-to-parliament
8. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/18/1170581210/india-same-sex-marriage-case-supreme-court
9. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/17/unpacking-indian-supreme-courts-verdict-on-same-sex-marriage
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_of_same-sex_unions_in_India
11. https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2023-posts/2023/12/7/the-dodging-technique-of-rights-adjudication-indian-supreme-court-in-marriage-equality-case
12. https://www.policyforum.net/indias-law-fails-lgbt-people/