We aren't masters of our private universe

TWO stories in The Tribune on Friday, on the worsening sex ratio in Punjab as well as the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow same-sex couples to get married anywhere in the country, may on the face of it seem both disparate as well as disconnected from the other.

But look closely, dear Reader. There’s a skein of something that links the two together — a something that militates against the idea of choice. What you wear, who you go out with, who you vote for, what you eat, who and how and when and why you marry who you want to marry… Perhaps it all begins with whether you will allow your girl’s foetus to complete a full-term and become a full-blown baby.

The fact is, both these pieces of news in The Tribune are joined by the idea of control. Someone doesn’t like the fact that you’re a girl, so get rid of her. Someone else doesn’t like the fact that you’re marrying someone of the same sex, even though you may love this person, because it militates against the idea of “holy matrimony”. Marriage is a social contract and society cannot be disturbed by images that I don’t approve of.

I must have control. I am judge, jury and executioner and I know better than you.

The odd thing is that it is none other than the Supreme Court, the upholder of the Constitution — the 75th anniversary of which we so joyfully celebrated only a few weeks ago — which is leading the main charge. So, when the Court dismissed a review petition on Thursday challenging a 2023 ruling refusing marriage for same-sex couples – several of whom had challenged this as a denial of their fundamental rights under the Constitution — it was effectively telling millions of same-sex partners that it knew better.

Now, let’s think about this for a second. The five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court — one of them an upstanding son from our own Punjab & Haryana High Court, Justice Surya Kant — has basically announced that it is the final arbiter on who you can marry. That it’s okay to do what you want behind the closed doors of your bedroom, but once outside in the public glare, you must follow certain societal norms.

There is a message for us hapless folk here — ordinary folk who happen to love and want to live with people of our same-sex choice and have children with them, via adoption or surrogacy, and take out life insurance policies and go for holidays together and on school application forms proudly say that we are both the parents of this child.

The message is that we are not masters of our own private universes. That the ‘lakshman rekha’ between homosexual and heterosexual couples is very much alive and well, and if we dare to cross it, then we will have to face the consequences.

Of course, the Hon’ble Bench has gotten around the anticipated accusation of discrimination by saying that there is “no unqualified right” to marriage. Try telling a heterosexual couple that, though. (Nor is this article going to point towards the Court’s persistent refusal to criminalise marital rape or why single, unmarried women cannot carry a surrogate child — no point veering off into other contentious matters.)

So here’s the thing. Back in 2018, the brave and courageous Supreme Court read down Section 377, basically knocked it off our history books because the 1861-era law criminalised sex between two people of the same sex. It was absolutely the right thing to do and the country cheered on the Court, because it was taking a step in favour of equal rights. It was standing up for the Constitution.

The current petitions were a natural follow-through of the Court’s withering dismissal of Section 377. Now that you let us come out of the closet, same-sex couples were saying, allow us to be just like you.

Fast-forward to Thursday, 2025. By refusing marriage, the Hon’ble Court was basically saying that it’s simply not okay to formalise this relationship between two same-sex consenting adults.

Of course, the question is why. Why do five — or eight judges, if you include those on the 2023 judgment in which three persons on the Bench tilted in favour of keeping marriage out of bounds — feel that they know more about love and marriage than those who are actually living it? Why do they feel they know better? Do they really know better?

Actually, this attempt at control begins at the beginning, right from the time you’re a foetus, even before you become a child, leave alone a man/woman. Back in 1994, India passed a law, the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, that prohibited you from medically seeking information on the sex of an unborn child. The Tribune story by Deepkamal Kochhar, citing civil registration data across Punjab, says that the sex ratio in 2023 has actually worsened in parts of Punjab — in Pathankot and Gurdaspur, the worst districts, only 864 and 888 girls were born, respectively, compared to 1,000 male children — because female foeticides, all illegal abortions, are still being carried out in defiance of the law.

Perhaps the Court is attempting to paint a picture of the ideal couple — the ‘hum do, hamaare do’ husband-wife with two ideal children. Perhaps it is subconsciously emulating the sanskari ideal that the RSS promotes, of the male head of the household and the protective, caring mother by his side. Perhaps it genuinely believes that such matters are not its business, that Parliament or state legislatures must know better.

Perhaps the Supreme Court doesn’t realise that this One Nation, One Happy Family construct is exactly that — a man-made construct that is far removed from reality. One glance at the teeming courts in our country where petitioners from all walks of life are seeking justice or one quick, second-hand look at the seamy side of life via Netflix serials like Mirzapur — or the first chapter of Anna Karenina, or the Mahabharata — is enough to give you some idea of the constant chaos that thrums beneath the palimpsest of society.

That’s the point of this article. The law of the land and courts must step into spaces where rights are being violated. They have little business in areas occupied by consenting adults, no matter what colour, sex or size.