NEW DELHI — India could be on the brink of repealing a 157-year-old law that criminalizes gay sex in what is one of the world’s largest and longest-running LGBT legal battles.
On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in a courtroom so full people barely had space to turn round, a bench of five judges from India’s highest court began hearing arguments against a law known as Section 377, which was introduced under British rule in 1861 and states that all sexual activity apart from heterosexual intercourse is “against the order of nature.”
If the Supreme Court judges strike down the law it would transform gay rights in a country of more than one billion people.
