Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju together made history when they were part of the panel that deemed section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law against homosexuality introduced by the British in India in 1860, as null and void.?
September 6, 2018 was the day when?a five-judge panel of the Supreme Court struck down the colonial era-sodomy laws encapsulated in Section 377 of the IPC that made consensual gay sex illegal. Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju were part of the panel that overturned the sodomy law.
For the two, it wasn't just a national victory but a personal one too. In a recent interview?with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, the two attorneys opened up about being a couple.
The two public-interest litigators, have been fighting for years to slash down he regressive law that not just reinstated their fundamental rights but also for people belonging to the LGBTQ across the country.
Arundhati Katju is the niece of former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju and Menaka Guruswamy is the daughter of Mohan Guruswamy, renowned political thinker and adviser to late PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
In the interview, Zakaria asks how they managed to get the Supreme court to retract their views on the sodomy laws to which Guruswamy says, 'It¡¯s one thing to have an old colonial era Sodomy Law and another to have that law being upheld by your court in contemporary times.'
Guruswamy and Katju had also argued the case in 2013 when the Supreme Court upheld the criminalisation of Section 377. This was after it was decriminalised by Delhi High Court in 2009.
Guruswamy goes on to speak about the challenges they faced back 2013 when they failed the case. At one point during the hearing Guruswamy says that a senior judge asked a law officer if he knows of any homosexual and the latter chuckles, ¡°No sir, I am not that modern.¡±
This statement was the turning point, says Guruswamy, after which they vowed never to let LGBT individuals be invisible in any?courtroom.¡¯
Earlier this year, , Arundhati Katju delivered a TEDx talk in Bosnia and Herzegovina¡¯s Sarajevo where she spoke about the case they fought.
¡°The law was an expression of the Victorian-era morality but it had come to be understood as an expression of conservative Indian social values,¡± she said. ¡°Criminal law shuts down on your aspirations,¡± Katju said during the talk.
Supreme Court lawyers Arundhati Katju and Menaka Guruswamy were also named in the Time magazine¡¯s list of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2019.
Senior advocate Guruswamy is a graduate of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, and a Rhodes Scholar. She has been a visiting faculty at the Yale Law School, Columbia Law School and New York University School of Law. Most recently, she was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin for 2016-2017.
Katju too is a graduate from NLSIU, Bangalore, and holds an LLM degree from Columbia Law School where she was a human rights fellow. She's also a James Kent scholar and public interest award honoree.