What do we mean by equality?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Growing up in a family of lawyers in Delhi, it wasn’t surprising that Saurabh Kirpal would choose a career in law. But it was only when he started living as an openly gay man with his partner in India that he experienced—what he describes in a video interview with Lounge—as “an eye-opening moment".
Suddenly the full brunt of inequality—the humiliating reality of living in one’s own country as a lesser citizen, in a perpetual state of discrimination—dawned on him. It is this bitter truth that led Kirpal to become one of the key advocates for marriage equality and argue for its legal sanctions before the Supreme Court last year. Although the apex court ruled against the petitions, leaving it up to the lawmakers to reform the status quo, the fight for marriage equality remains alive.
In his new book Who is Equal? The Equality Code of the Constitution, Kirpal takes a hard look at the concept of equality as enshrined in the Constitution, and especially the often conflicting ways in which it has been interpreted by courts in India. Such confusions owe their origins to the Constitution itself, either to its linguistic ambiguity or to the inescapably elitist mindset of its creators. The chief architect of the document, B.R.
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