The Supreme Court collegium recommends Saurabh Kirpal’s name as Delhi HC judge

Sebastian Melmoth’s was a life of misery that came to an end in a shabby Paris hotel in 1900. In his last years, Oscar Wilde could not survive the ignominy of being jailed for being gay in Victorian England. He fled to France at the end of a two-year rigorous jail term for being unnatural with his sexual preference. To escape being jeered when recognised, he changed his name. Homosexuality took everything away from him; the Victorian era purred in insolence. It is the era that is no longer with us today, but homosexuality is as normal as heterosexuality or queerdom. We have come a long, long way from not just that dark British period but our own skewed times that till 2018, when the Supreme Court of India read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, criminalised homosexuality. Considering the United Kingdom decriminalised homosexual acts only in 1967, the spirit of the Anglo-Irish playwright would have had to wait for over six decades after his death to heave a sigh of sexual relief. In that sense, the decision of the Supreme Court collegium to elevate Senior Advocate Saurabh Kirpal as a judge of the Delhi High Court comes barely three years after the quashing of Section 377 and marks the first act of the higher judiciary breaking the pink glass ceiling.

If the recommendation is approved, it is not that Kirpal will become the first gay judge of a High Court in India. Rather, the judiciary would in all wisdom have opened the doors to welcome a gay judge. Kirpal comes from a distinguished family, his father having been the Chief Justice of India. From St Stephen’s, he went to read law in Oxford. He completed his masters in law from Cambridge. He has specialised in civil, commercial and constitutional law. He is openly homosexual and speaks for LGBTQ rights. He was among the team of lawyers who worked on the landmark Navtej Singh Johar case that led to the Supreme Court decriminalising homosexuality. Kirpal has two peers in the UK. It was only in 2002 that the Britons appointed the first openly gay judge, Sir Adrian Fulford, to the High Court. Four years later came the turn of another openly gay judge, Sir Terence Etherton, to join him on the Bench. Kirpal was once quoted about the importance of a gay judge in India: “If there was a member of the LGBTQIA community on the Bench…[but also] for that young, gay child or that young trans child in school, there would be a feeling that they, too, could reach great heights.” For those who still believe being gay is sin, let us hear from Wilde: “…such a great affection of an elder for a younger man...such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy…. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.... There is nothing unnatural about it.”