NEW DELHI: Refusing to soften its stand on same-sex marriages, the Centre on Monday said a marriage is permissible only between a biological woman and man.
In his submission in the Delhi High Court, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta argued that ‘spouse’ means either husband or wife and ‘marriage’ is a term associated with heterosexual couples.
“The issue here is if a marriage is permissible between homosexual couples. There is some misconception regarding Navtej Singh Johar case. It merely decriminalises a consensual homosexual act. It does not talk about marriage,” Mehta said, in a reference to the landmark Supreme Court verdict of 2018 that decriminalised all consensual sex among adults, A bench of Chief Justice D N Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh was hearing the arguments on a batch of three petitions.
The bench listed the matter for final hearing on November 30.
In the first of these petitions, Abhijit Iyer Mitra and three others have sought a declaration to recognise same-sex marriage under the Hindu Marriage Act and the Special Marriage Act (SMA). Another plea has been filed by two women seeking to get married under the SMA.
The third petition is by Joydeep Sengupta, an Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) card holder, his partner, a US citizen named Russell Blaine Stephens, and Mario Dpenha, an Indian citizen and queer rights activist pursuing a PhD at Rutgers University, USA.
The plea seeks that a foreign-origin spouse of an OCI cardholder should be allowed to apply for OCI registration regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
During the hearing, senior lawyer Karuna Nandy said Sengupta and Stephens got married in New York and the laws applicable in their case are the Citizenship Act, the FMA and the SMA.
She submitted that the Citizenship Act provides that a person married to an OCI, whose marriage is registered and subsisting for two years, should be declared eligible to apply for an OCI card as a spouse. The Act is silent on gender and sexuality of the spouse, she contended.