Same-Sex Marriage

WHILE IN COLLEGE, we were taught that the British Parliament is so powerful that apart from making a man woman and woman man, it can do anything and everything. Well, we have our highest court in the land which may well do what even the mighty British Parliament cannot, that is, legitimise same-sex marriage and pronounce one partner man and another, woman. For, a marriage generally presupposes separate sexual roles for each partner—unless the Supreme Court outlaws even that traditional sociological and physical construct of a marital union. Now, we have it on the authority of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) that gender is fluid, not determined at birth. Very well, then. I can think of some people on a DTC bus insisting on travelling free like all women who, thanks to Arvind Kejriwal’s revadi-for-votes politics, enjoy free and limitless travel on DTC. Also, I hope that by the time the apex court is done with making a pathbreaking decision, regardless of whether it is in step with the law of the land as enshrined in the statute book or with the general societal mores, any of the honourable judges hearing the headline-making case will not have proven the validity of their claim about the fluidity of gender they so flourishingly talk about. Now, quite apart from the right or wrong of the court taking up this case, which probably impacts, if at all, the tiniest of a tiny portion of our people, the CJI would have made a lasting contribution to the lives of tens of millions of litigants who run from pillar to post seeking justice. Admitted, unclogging the arteries of the justice system is a hard grind, a thankless job which has defied the well-intentioned efforts of several of his predecessors. But as the one with a relatively long tenure as CJI in recent years, the onus was on the present incumbent to grapple with the everyday struggles of the common litigants to address their grievances against an entrenched and ossified system of justice delivery which bestows an extraordinary privilege on those with deep pockets. Of course, neither the negligible woke generation, which is accorded a disproportionately large space by the urban-centric English press, nor the self-styled tribunes of liberalism and modernism in Western metropolises would have paid attention to the hard grind required to reduce the humongous backlog of pendency at every tier of our legal system. Now that the apex court is engaged in what may turn out to be a challenge to the collective wisdom of our parliamentarians regardless of their party affiliations, let me end with a poor joke from social media inspired by the ongoing hearing: A man entered a marriage reception hoping to help himself to the choicest of eats and drinks. On being questioned, he claimed to be from the girl’s side. “Those skunks beat the hell out of me because I was told ‘Dono ladkey waley tthey’.”

DAYS BEFORE THE by-now-familiar Mumbai drama which saw Sharad Pawar, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief, resign and withdraw his resignation, his daughter Supriya Sule had spoken of two upheavals, one in Mumbai and another in New Delhi. We now know and await with bated breath the Delhi part of the prediction. Speculation centres around the outcome of the pending case in the apex court about the legitimacy of the Shinde-Sena split with the Uddhav Thackeray-controlled wing to form the government with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Supreme Court verdict could trigger an end to the always-odd three-legged Maha Vikas Aghadi, with NCP aligning with BJP, both at the Centre and in Maharashtra? Thus leaving Uddhav saddled with the Congress non-starter. As for the Shinde faction, perforce, it will have to continue with BJP given the bitterness between him and Uddhav. A win-win for Modi ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls?

A WELL-RESEARCHED biography of Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the father of India’s nuclear programme, by Bakhtiar K Dadabhoy has reproduced a letter which a young Bhabha wrote to Hormasji Maneckji Seervai, the authoritative constitutional expert. It has relevance for our times: “Unity of all mankind cannot be achieved by blotting out one civilisation and implanting another… an unbiased history of India ought to be taught in schools… the part that ought to be more studied is not the Mogul period, but some of the more ancient periods, such as those of Chandragupta and later—I mean the real Hindu empires.” Amen.

About The Author

Virendra Kapoor