When the Supreme Court read down Section 377 in 2018, there was a collective sigh across queer India. It felt like someone had finally opened a window in a suffocating room. I remember sitting with my phone in hand, scrolling through celebratory posts, feeling something close to relief but also something like caution. Decriminalisation meant that the State could no longer send people like me to jail for who we loved. But I knew, even then, that the law doesn’t stop policing queer lives just because one line in the Penal Code has been rewritten. Law, in India, has a habit of finding new ways to reproduce old fears.
The truth is that queerness was never only criminalised through Section 377. It was criminalised through everyday interactions with police, through families who used the law as a threat, through bureaucratic forms that insist gender comes in only two boxes, through hospitals that still treat queerness as pathology. The law may not explicitly seek us out anymore, but it continues to shape how queer people are watched, controlled and disciplined.
One of the clearest examples is how the police continue to use other legal provisions to harass queer couples. The moment two adults disappear together, families file missing person or kidnapping complaints, conveniently omitting the fact that the “missing” person is an adult woman who simply refused a heterosexual life. In many elopement cases, the police arrive not to ensure safety but to “restore family honour.” The Supreme Court’s own LGBTQ+ guidelines from 2022, which ask police to avoid harassment and respect privacy, often sit untouched in training manuals. On the ground, the police behave as though they are moral guardians, not public servants.
I’ve heard stories from queer friends who had to hide in hotel rooms while their families filed 363 IPC (kidnapping) against their partners. Adults, hiding like fugitives, because the law listens to blood before it listens to consent. People forget that even after 377, queer autonomy exists in a grey zone. Legally, adults have the absolute right to choose their partner. Practically, that right dissolves the moment someone’s father files an FIR claiming they were “lured” or “manipulated.”
Another space where policing continues is gender identity. Yes, the NALSA judgment was a breakthrough, granting the right to self-identification. But the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, quietly rolled back that freedom by requiring district-level certification. The moment a State demands proof of identity for something as intimate as gender, it becomes gatekeeping. Many trans and genderqueer people still avoid medical spaces because doctors treat them as puzzles to be solved, not people to be affirmed. Hospitals often ask invasive questions, police stations misgender complainants, and government offices insist that biology and paperwork should match perfectly.
This bureaucratic policing is silent but powerful. It decides who gets welfare benefits, who can update their ID, and who gets respectful treatment at public counters. It’s not as dramatic as criminal law, but it shapes everyday life far more cruelly.
Another way the law polices queer lives is through its absence. The absence of protection is a form of control. Queer couples are still denied civil rights that heterosexual couples take for granted: marriage, adoption, insurance, pension, and inheritance. When the Supreme Court refused marriage equality in 2023, the message was clear: queer people could have dignity, as long as dignity remained symbolic. The law would respect us as citizens, but not enough to give us the material rights that structure everyday life. We could love, yes, but only quietly, without asking for institutional recognition.
This non-recognition polices queer life in subtle ways. Couples are forced to remain financially separate even after years of living together. Partners cannot make medical decisions for each other. If one dies, the other has no legal claim to the home they built together. Even simple things like applying for a joint bank account or health insurance require a heterosexual template. This is policing through omission. You are not told you’re illegal, but you are made invisible.
And then there is the social policing that the law indirectly encourages. Landlords refuse queer tenants because “unmarried couples are not allowed.” Employers quietly withdraw job offers from trans people, claiming “team fit issues.” Schools suspend students for expressing gender variance. None of this technically violates any one provision, but the lack of explicit anti-discrimination laws leaves queer people defenceless. The law’s silence becomes society’s excuse.
In many ways, the Indian legal system behaves like a strict parent who has stopped using corporal punishment but still uses emotional manipulation, guilt, and silence. “You are free,” it says, “but don’t make demands.” “You are equal,” it says, “but don’t expect the same rights.” The policing hasn’t stopped. It has simply changed shape.
As a queer person studying law, this contradiction feels personal. I read progressive judgments in class, judgments full of poetic language about dignity and autonomy. But outside the classroom, I’ve seen queer friends detained at police stations for just existing in public. I’ve listened to trans people say they avoid government hospitals because they would rather pay out of pocket than face humiliation. The gap between doctrine and lived experience is vast. Sometimes it feels like two different Indias: one on paper and one on the street.
Still, I believe in naming these contradictions. It’s the only way to push the law toward what it claims it wants to be. Decriminalisation was never the end of the queer rights struggle. It was simply the removal of a lock. Now the real work is dismantling the entire room — the moral policing, the bureaucratic violence, the legal silences, the everyday erasures. Queer people deserve more than symbolic dignity. We deserve safety, recognition, autonomy, and a law that actually sees us as full citizens.
The question today is not “Is queer love legal?” The question is “Why does the law still behave like our chaperone?” Until the State learns to trust queer autonomy, the policing will continue — subtle, scattered, but unmistakably present. And queer India will continue navigating a legal landscape where freedom exists in theory but must be fought for in practice, every day.
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