Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) is related with which of the following subjects ?

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Correct — option (2), homosexuality. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was headed 'Unnatural offences' and punished voluntary carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal. On its face the words covered certain sexual acts irrespective of the sexes of the persons involved, but in practice the section was the instrument by which homosexual conduct was criminalised in India, and it is with homosexuality that it is universally associated. The provision is a colonial inheritance: the Indian Penal Code was drafted by the Law Commission under Thomas Babington Macaulay, enacted in 1860 and brought into force in 1862, and Section 377 carried into India a Victorian view of sexual morality that was later exported by the same route to other British colonies. Its modern history is a sequence a candidate should be able to recite. In Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi in 2009 the Delhi High Court read the section down so that it would not apply to consensual sexual acts between adults in private. In Suresh Kumar Koushal v. Naz Foundation in 2013 the Supreme Court set that judgment aside and restored the section in full, holding that the question was for Parliament. Finally, in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, decided on 6 September 2018, a five-judge constitution bench unanimously held Section 377 unconstitutional in so far as it criminalised consensual sexual conduct between adults, resting the decision on the rights to equality, to dignity and to privacy. What survived is as important as what fell: the remainder of Section 377 continued to apply to non-consensual acts, to acts involving minors and to bestiality, so the section was read down rather than erased. Two further points complete the picture. The word 'homosexuality' does not appear in the section at all — the question is testing the subject the provision is known for, not its language. And the Indian Penal Code itself has since been replaced: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 came into force on 1 July 2024, so a candidate today should know Section 377 as a provision of the repealed Code whose leading case remains good law. The answer to be marked is option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Temple entry is not a subject of the Indian Penal Code at all, which is why this option is wrong in kind rather than in detail. Access of the so-called untouchable castes to Hindu temples was fought out through a different body of law entirely: proclamations and Acts of the princely states and provinces, of which the Travancore Temple Entry Proclamation of 1936 and the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act of 1947 are the best known; then Article 25(2)(b) of the Constitution, which permits the State to make law providing for the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus; and then the Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955, renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976, which made the enforcement of any disability arising out of untouchability an offence. In Maharashtra the subject is remembered chiefly through Sane Guruji's fast at Pandharpur from 1 to 11 May 1947, at the end of which the doors of the Vitthal temple were opened. Section 377 has no connection with any of this.  (c) Adultery was indeed an offence under the Indian Penal Code, but under Section 497, not Section 377, and this option exists to test whether the candidate has the two numbers apart. Section 497 punished a man who had sexual intercourse with the wife of another man without that man's consent, with imprisonment of up to five years; the wife was not punishable even as an abettor, and under Section 198(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure only the aggrieved husband could set the law in motion. In Joseph Shine v. Union of India, decided on 27 September 2018 by a five-judge bench, the Supreme Court struck the section down as archaic, arbitrary and paternalistic, holding that it treated a wife as the property of her husband and violated her autonomy, dignity and privacy. Note the coincidence of dates that makes the confusion easy: Section 377 was read down on 6 September 2018 and Section 497 was struck down three weeks later, both by constitution benches, and both cases are cited together in any account of that year.  (d) Surrogacy has never been a subject of the penal law in India in the way this option suggests. It was for years governed only by guidelines for assisted reproductive technology clinics, which allowed a large commercial surrogacy industry to grow, and it was then brought under dedicated legislation — the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, which permits altruistic surrogacy in defined circumstances and prohibits commercial surrogacy, together with the parallel statute regulating assisted reproductive technology. Restrictions had begun earlier, with foreign homosexual couples and single parents barred in 2013 and commercial surrogacy for foreign nationals stopped in 2015. The point of the option is that a candidate who knows only that Section 377 concerns sexual matters may reach for any subject in that field; the discipline required is to attach the number to the specific subject, and Section 377 is the unnatural offences provision under which homosexual conduct was prosecuted.

Concept: Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code was one of a small group of provisions that survived from 1860 into the twenty-first century and then fell to constitutional challenge. Its language — carnal intercourse against the order of nature — was deliberately vague and its practical effect was to make homosexual conduct criminal, with a punishment extending to imprisonment for life. The litigation that ended it is a case study in how constitutional interpretation moves. In 2009 the Delhi High Court in Naz Foundation held that the section, so far as it covered consensual acts between adults in private, violated Articles 14, 15 and 21. In 2013 the Supreme Court in Suresh Kumar Koushal reversed that ruling, observing that only a minuscule fraction of the population was affected and that repeal was a matter for the legislature. The ground then shifted: in 2017 a nine-judge bench in K. S. Puttaswamy held privacy to be a fundamental right under Article 21 and expressly doubted the reasoning in Koushal. On 6 September 2018 a five-judge bench in Navtej Singh Johar unanimously held Section 377 unconstitutional to the extent that it criminalised consensual sexual conduct between adults, while leaving the section standing for non-consensual acts, acts with minors and bestiality. The same year produced two other decisions of the same family — Joseph Shine on adultery under Section 497 and the Sabarimala judgment on entry to a temple — so that 2018 is a year worth learning as a block. The Indian Penal Code has since been replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, in force from 1 July 2024.

State PCS 2022 Q85 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q85 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer