New Delhi: The right to privacy cannot be denied to members of the LGBT community merely because they have unconventional sexual orientation and form a miniscule fraction of the over 1.32 billion Indian population, the Supreme Court observed on Thursday. The nine-judge bench, which held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right, made this observation while assailing the earlier apex court verdict in the appeal by an NGO on behalf of the LGBT community in which it said they formed a miniscule fraction of the country’s population and the right to privacy cannot be a ground to set aside a penal law.
Chief Justice J.S. Khehar and Justices R.K. Agrawal, S.A. Nazeer and D.Y. Chandrachud, who were part of the nine-judge constitution bench, said that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is deeply offensive to the dignity of an individual. “A miniscule fraction of the country's population constitutes lesbians, gays, bisexuals or transgenders (LGBT) is not a sustainable basis to deny the right to privacy,” the bench said. The apex court said that discrete and insular minorities face grave dangers of discrimination for the simple reason that their views, beliefs or way of life does not accord with the ‘mainstream’.
“Discrimination against an individual on the basis of sexual orientation is offensive to the dignity and self-worth of the individual. Equality demands that the sexual orientation of each individual in society must be protected on an even platform. It clarified that since the challenge to Section 377 (Section which criminalises gay sex) is pending consideration before another bench of the court, it would leave the constitutional validity to be decided in an “appropriate proceeding”.
