That’s What the Government of India Just Argued. In the Supreme Court. About Your Rights.
There is a sentence that should have broken through every news feed in India yesterday. It didn’t, because it arrived dressed in legal language, before a bench hearing a case about temple entry, in a courtroom most people will never enter. But strip away the procedural scaffolding and what you have is this: the Solicitor General of India stood before a nine-judge Constitution Bench and told the Supreme Court that in a democracy, the majoritarian view typically prevails and that judgments which said otherwise were, in his submission, not good law.
He was talking about Navtej Singh Johar. The 2018 verdict that decriminalised same-sex relationships. The judgment that told us, for the first time in the language of the Constitution, that we exist, that we matter, that our love is not a crime.
The government wants the reasoning behind that judgment declared invalid.
Let that settle.
They are not asking for Section 377 to return. They were careful to say so. But they are asking the Supreme Court to take the constitutional doctrine that produced Navtej — a doctrine called constitutional morality — and rule that it has no business being used to test legislation. That courts cannot invoke it. That Parliament, which reflects the will of the majority, should not be second-guessed by a principle as subjective, as they put it, as constitutional morality.
What is constitutional morality? It is the idea that the Constitution has its own moral vision of dignity, equality, autonomy and that this vision can and must override what the majority believes at any given moment. It is the reason why fundamental rights exist at all. A Constitution without constitutional morality is just a document that tells the powerful what they already want to hear.
This doctrine is not a quirk invented by activist judges. It traces back to B.R. Ambedkar himself, who warned that constitutional morality would have to be cultivated in a country where social morality (the morality of the crowd) could crush individual liberty without a second thought. He knew. He had lived it.
When the Solicitor General argues that social morality, the majoritarian view, should be the governing standard, he is not making a neutral procedural point. He is making a political argument with a very specific set of winners and losers. The winners are whoever the majority happens to be. The losers are everyone the majority has historically decided to exclude queer people, religious minorities, Dalit communities, women who want to enter temples, anyone whose existence makes the crowd uncomfortable.
And here is what makes this moment particularly important for us: this argument did not arrive in isolation. Eight days before this submission was made in the Supreme Court, President Droupadi Murmu gave her assent to the Transgender Persons Amendment Act, 2026 — a law that erased trans men, trans women, and genderqueer persons from its own definition. A law passed in twelve days, with no community consultation, no committee referral, no meaningful debate. A law that told an entire community: the state does not trust you to know who you are.
One government. Eight days. Two moves.
First, pass a law that removes rights from people whose identities the majority finds inconvenient. Then, go to court and argue that the constitutional doctrine those people would use to challenge that law should be declared invalid.
This is not a coincidence. This is a sequence.
The logic being advanced in that courtroom is the same logic that kept Section 377 alive for 160 years. Our desire was a choice. Our love was a corruption. The majority found it immoral, and so the law agreed. Navtej rejected that. NALSA, the 2014 transgender rights judgment, rejected it for trans people a decade earlier. The 2026 Amendment Act walked back through the door NALSA had shut. And now, the government is asking the Supreme Court to take the key out of the lock entirely — so that no future court can shut that door again.
We have always known that rights given through law can be taken back through law. What is harder to sit with is the realisation that the government is not simply taking back rights. It is trying to remove the mechanism by which rights are protected. Not just the what, but the how. Not just the outcome, but the foundation.
Legal challenges are coming. The Supreme Court has surprised us before. NALSA came from the judiciary when Parliament would not move. Navtej came when Section 377 had already been reinstated by the very same court. The institution has, at its best, been the last line.
But the courtroom is not the only place this is decided. It is decided in how loudly we name what is happening. It is decided in whether we treat these events as isolated news items or as the coordinated strategy they are.
