Acceptance after verdict

Civil society will have a tougher time convincing people of the importance of granting rights to sexual minorities, since it is not clear that a homosexual lifestyle can work in the Indian context

The surprising thing about the Supreme Court judgment decriminalising homosexuality was not the judgment itself, whose tone and tenor were expected given the arguments made before and the pronouncements made by the learned judges in the weeks leading up to the verdict.

It was the lack of any large-scale negative reaction to a judgment that took forward the cause of individual rights by encompassing sexual minorities. In its wording, the judgment was diametrically different from the Supreme Court ruling of 2013 that had struck down an earlier Delhi High Court order on decriminalising homosexuality by relying, argumentatively, on the low