New Delhi: The Centre on Monday opposed a clutch of petitions demanding recognition of same-sex marriages, telling the Delhi high court that Covid-related matters should be prioritised as nobody was dying due to lack of marriage certificates.
Appearing for the central government, solicitor general Tushar Mehta urged a bench of justices Rajiv Sahai Endlaw and Amit Bansal to defer the hearing of the cases as they didn’t qualify as “extremely urgent” matters.
“Law officers are struggling with Covid issues. As a government, our focus in terms of urgency is on urgent, imminent issues,” Mehta said.
But senior advocate Saurabh Kirpal, representing one of the petitioners, said the matter should be decided expeditiously.
Senior advocate Maneka Guruswamy, appearing for another petitioner, said there are 70 million Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) people in the country and the community was struggling to get admissions in hospitals and was being left out everywhere.
“We cannot access our partners, cannot look after sick parents,” she said, emphasising the urgency of the matter.
To this, Mehta replied: “You don’t need marriage certificate for hospitals, nobody is dying because they don’t have marriage certificate.”
{{/usCountry}}To this, Mehta replied: “You don’t need marriage certificate for hospitals, nobody is dying because they don’t have marriage certificate.”
{{/usCountry}}He also said that matters should not be listed before the bench of justices Rajiv Sahai Endlaw and Amit Bansal as according to the roster, they are currently hearing cases related to the Armed Forces, Land Acquisition etc and not Public Interest Litigation (PIL).
The bench then adjourned the matter to July 6, asking the Centre to seek clarification on the roster from the chief justice of the high court.
The court was hearing a batch of three petitions for legalisation of same-sex marriages.
The first was filed by Abhijit Iyer Mitra, Gopi Shankar, Giti Thadani and G Oorvasi and contended that the Hindu Marriage Act (HMA) did not distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual marriages if one were to go by how it was worded. The 1955 act clearly stated that marriages could be solemnised between “any two Hindus,” the petition argued.
The second petition was filed by two mental health professionals, Kavita Arora, 47, and Ankita Khanna, 36, seeking legal recognition of their marriage under two different civil laws, the Special Marriage Act (SMA) and the Foreign Marriage Act (FMA),
The third plea was filed by two men , Vaibhav Jain, an Indian citizen, and Parag Vijay Mehta, an overseas citizen of India , who got married in the United States, where same-sex marriage is legal, in 2017. They also sought the same relief as Arora and Khanna, stating that an Indian consulate had refused to register their union this year under the FMA.
While hearing the matters in October last year, a bench headed by justice Endlaw observed that “we may shed our inhibition” when it came to same-sex marriages. It had said that laws are gender-neutral and the Centre may try to interpret the law in favour of the citizens in the country.
But in February, the Centre opposed the pleas, saying a marriage in India could be recognised only if it was between a “biological man” and a “biological woman” capable of producing children.