Live-in relationships are having a moment in Indian courtrooms. Last week, the Delhi High Court made two important observations about such relationships. Though made in separate cases, the two observations are closely related.
On 20 August, Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma questioned the government on the lack of legal recognition for same-sex partners to act as medical representatives for each other.
“The law recognises a live-in relationship between a man and a woman. Why will it not allow a live-in relationship between a man and a man?” Justice Sharma asked the Centre.
Arshiya Takkar, who has been in a relationship with advocate Chand Chopra since June 2015, filed the petition in July last year. In December 2023, the couple held a commitment ceremony in New Zealand. But Indian law does not recognise their relationship.
While the government counsel asked the court for time to “take instructions” from the authorities, senior advocate Saurabh Kirpal highlighted that the court had already given the Centre a ‘last opportunity’ to file its counter affidavit in July 2025.
A week earlier, the Delhi High Court observed that a live-in relationship between consenting adults is “akin to marriage”. Justice Saurabh Banerjee made the observation while granting police protection to a heterosexual couple in a live-in relationship. The couple alleged threats from the woman’s family.
“The petitioners herein, though in a live-in relationship, are not legally married to each other. However, being consenting adults, the same is akin to marriage,” the court observed.
The answer to Sharma’s question can be found in Banerjee’s observation.
Rights to queer couples
Live-in relationships are a conundrum for Indian law. As the equations of intimacy change in urban India, courts have had to build the framework case by case, often leading to more questions than answers. And in the process, they have ended up turning live-in relationships into ‘marriage-lite’, lawyer and writer Ritwik Choudhury argued in a recent Opinion piece in Bar and Bench.
“By systematically importing the criminal liabilities, financial obligations and institutional surveillance of marriage into the sphere of live-in relationships, the State and the judiciary are inadvertently defeating the very purpose of non-marital cohabitation,” Choudhury wrote.
He stresses that law must protect victims in a live-in relationship as it does for those in a marriage. But Choudhury also highlights the paradox in creating a legal category for a relationship dynamic that was meant as a way of “stepping outside” the institution of marriage. And the judiciary is not alone in the exercise; it has the State’s hand too.
In Uttarakhand, the Uniform Civil Code requires live-in couples to ‘register’ their relationship. Failure to do so can attract imprisonment for up to six months and financial penalties.
In an environment where live-in relationships are beginning to resemble a marriage with each new case, will the State recognise same-sex relationships? The Narendra Modi government has been lethargic, to say the least, in extending rights to queer couples after the marriage equality judgment of 2023.
In Supriyo @ Supriya Chakraborty & Anr. v. Union of India, the Supreme Court directed the government to constitute a high-powered committee (HPC) to examine and recommend administrative measures to extend specific rights and welfare benefits to queer couples. The committee was created alright, but it has met for all of two times in 2024, Yes, We Exist reported.
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‘Trans rights are human rights’
In many countries, cohabitation rights and civil unions paved the way for marriage equality to be written into law. For a government that opposed same-sex marriage and called it an “urban elitist concept”, recognising live-in relationships for gay and lesbian people would be the same as offering them a stepping stone.
Denied the bouquet, Indian queers are now fighting for the flower. If they can’t have marriage equality, they will have the State recognise live-in relationships “akin to marriage”.
A word of caution, however, for the matrimonially inclined members of my community. In the West, gays and lesbians won the right to marry, but broke bonds with their trans brethren in the aftermath. As the trans community faces the same kind of social exclusion and hatred that homosexuals faced in the 1980s, an LGB alliance is on the rise. The fight for Indian gay men and lesbian women must be about more than the right to gift your partner a gold bracelet.
Drag queen Lush Monsoon exemplified this in her speech after crowning the winner of The LaLiT’s Battle Royale 2. She put trans lives before the homosexual fight for respectability.
“Trans rights are human rights!” Monsoon bellowed from the stage as the audience erupted in support. “Marriage equality for all!”
Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)