David Asta Alares |
New Delhi (EFE).- Aditya Advani and Michael Tarr said “I do” three decades ago in New Delhi, in a family ceremony presided over by a Hindu priest, but the lack of official recognition of homosexual unions in India made them it has caused a multitude of problems that others “take for granted”.
With the petitions before the Supreme Court to validate gay marriages, which India’s highest judicial body begins to analyze tomorrow, the expectations of Advani, an Indian national, and Tarr, an American, and the LGBT community have never been higher. despite government opposition.
Problems that others take for granted
“We met 30 or 32 years ago and some time later we came to India to visit my parents, and my mother came up with the idea that we could get married, so we thought it was a good idea,” Advani told EFE. a landscape architect who returned to India a decade ago after living in the United States for years.
From Advani’s studio in a wealthy neighborhood of the Indian capital, Tarr recalled with a smile how spontaneous the ceremony was, organized in a week and with the services of a Hindu priest.
“You didn’t make plans like you do now,” Tarr explained.
Although in the eyes of their family and friends Advani and Tarr have been married for three decades, and despite the fact that in the US they are a common-law couple, the lack of recognition is “a problem” in India, where a British law of more than For 150 years, it criminalized relationships between people of the same sex until it was overthrown by the Supreme Court in 2018.
The problems range from Tarr’s tourist status, which has kept him out of the country during the coronavirus pandemic, to the inability to work or open a bank account.
“It is a serious problem because we have children, we are a family unit and not just a couple,” he explained, specifying that they are the parents of twins by surrogacy before India prohibited homosexual couples from having children this way.
Roommates
Difficulties similar to those experienced by the academic Ruth Vanita, straddling the US and India with her partner, who married in a religious ritual in the year 2000.
“As with many other couples of this type, my wife is considered a legal foreigner in India,” without access to the lifetime visas that heterosexual couples between Indians and foreigners can obtain, he told EFE.
Lack of recognition affects Indian couples in other ways.
“A young lesbian couple, friends of mine, lived in Delhi for two years (…) one of them went into a coma unexpectedly and was taken away by her family, made all the medical and funeral decisions when she died, as well as taking all her possessions,” Vanita explained.
“They treated their partner like a roommate,” she explained.
Homosexual unions are not new in India
The academic, author of books on homosexual marriages in the Asian country, stressed that this type of union is not new or the product of Western influence as the most conservative sectors argue.
“Many people don’t know how many young, low-income, non-English speaking couples, many of them women, have been married in religious rites since at least 1987 across the country,” he explained.
Leela and Urmila, two female police officers who married with family approval in 1987, is one of the earliest examples Vanita is aware of “before there was a gay movement in India or marriage equality anywhere in the world.” world”.
The academic has also recorded more than two hundred cases of homosexual couples who “either got married, or committed suicide together, or sometimes both” since the 1980s.
Vanita hopes that the courts will recognize the rights of gay couples in India “sooner or later, I hope sooner.”
An ambition shared by Advani, for whom this measure would mean a “normalization of millions of lives” in a country that “has never been intrinsically homophobic”, and which in his opinion inherited the repressive attitude of Victorian England towards same-sex unions. .
While all eyes are on the Indian Supreme Court, after decriminalizing homosexuality in 2018, the government’s opposition to gay marriage expressed last March causes concern.