NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday got a commitment from the Centre on setting up a high-level committee that will examine the matter of providing basic social rights to same-sex couples, like joint bank accounts or nominating a partner in insurance policies for those in cohabitory relationships, days after it had nudged it to do so.
As it would need coordination with more than one ministry, a committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary will be constituted, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta submitted before a five-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud. The LGBTQIA+ petitioners, he said, could interact with the panel, which would try to address their requests so far as “possible and legally permissible”.
The CJI termed the initiative a big step forward, saying with this the government has accepted the right of same-sex couples to cohabit as a socially accepted reality. He added that the court was ready to play the role of a facilitator for real progress in terms of wider social acceptance of the right to cohabit.
The CJI added that if the court had to come to the conclusion that interpreting the provisions of the Special Marriage Act, 1954 was not simple and involved inter-linkages with other statutes and personal law, it didn’t want members of the LBGTQIA+ to be in a situation where they did not have anything else “available in hand”.
When Abhishek Manu Singhvi, the petitioner’s counsel, argued that mere administrative tweaking would not resolve the issue legally, the CJI said, “We are saying that we will, of course, have to decide this (legal recognition to same-sex marriages) as a matter of concept but to the extent to which the government takes the first step forward, it would be a substantial advance beyond of what we have today.”
‘Not popular morality’
“We don’t go by popular morality or segmental morality but what the Constitution mandates,” the CJI said when it was argued that same-sex couples wanted to get married
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