Seeking adjournment of petitions for the recognition of same-sex marriages on Monday, the Centre on Monday told the Delhi High Court that in face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic there are more serious issues at hand.
"Nobody is dying because they don’t have a marriage certificate,” Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court.
Representing one of the petitioners in the matter, Senior Advocate Saurab Kripal said the government is supposed to be neutral, and the court has to determine urgency. Senior advocate Dr Menaka Guruswamy, who also represents a few of the petitioners expressed the urgency of the hearing, reasoning that it affected the lives of 70 million LGBTQ people in the country. “We are left out in hospitals, medical treatment,” she said.
The pleas sought to grant recognition to same-sex marriage under the Hindu Marriage Act, Special Marriage Act and Foreign Marriage Act.
During the hearing, the SG also raised the question of roster change. The two-judge bench headed by Justice Rajiv Sahi Endlaw adjourned the hearing and listed the matter after July 6, while asking the Centre to seek clarification regarding the question of the roster.
The petitions came in as the Centre rejected same-sex marriage as a fundamental right after the decriminalization of homosexuality under section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, as told to Delhi High Court. The government also submitted an affidavit saying that same-sex couples living together as partners and having a sexual relationship cannot be termed as “Indian family unit”. It stated that fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution was subject to the procedure established by the law, and same-sex marriages were “neither recognised nor accepted in any uncodified personal laws or any codified statutory laws”.
In a same-sex marriage, it was not possible or feasible to term one of the partners as “husband” and the other as “wife” and so, “the statutory scheme of many statutory enactments will become otiose”, the government stated.