Arshiya Takkar and Chand Chopra started dating in June 2015. Arshiya, who works in textiles, and Chand, a lawyer, are both based in Delhi. The two women moved in together in 2018, and got engaged in December 2019. Meanwhile, a clutch of petitions seeking marriage equality for queer persons moved through India’s justice system, first in the Kerala and Delhi High Courts, and eventually in the Supreme Court. Arshiya and Chand settled in to wait out the verdict.
In October 2023, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India refused to legalise marriage between same-sex couples. It also held that same-sex couples could not enter into a civil union, a legal relationship that could potentially provide similar protections as a marriage.
Two months later, Arshiya and Chand solemnised their relationship with a commitment ceremony attended by their loved ones in Delhi. Their families and friends were supportive, if a little confused. Arshiya’s grandmother called the event an “oath-taking ceremony,” Arshiya recounted with a laugh.
A trip to New Zealand, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2013, was already on the cards for Arshiya and Chand. On 14 December 2023, they seized the opportunity and got married there.
But back home, the dissonance between their commitment to each other and the law’s resistance to affirming their relationship gnawed at the couple. If a heterosexual marriage is defined by shared lives, rituals, families, and futures, then Arshiya and Chand couldn’t see why queer couples like them were denied the legal protections extended to married people. “You have the same joys, you have the same sorrows, you have the same fights, you have the same agony and everything…” Arshiya told queerbeat. “So then, why not the same laws?”
In every way that matters, Chand and Arshiya are each other’s partners. Yet, within the Indian bureaucracy, they may as well have no ties. “I am a stranger to her in the eyes of law,” Chand told queerbeat.
This realisation spurred them to action. “Let’s drop the word ‘marriage’ right now and just get some rights first,” Arshiya said they decided. “We wanted to slowly tackle smaller issues that we will have to face on a day-to-day basis in our life and see what rights and recognition we can get on the basis of that,” Chand added.
Arshiya and Chand trained their sights on securing queer people the right to make medical decisions for their partners. They focused in particular on a provision issued under the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956, which governs medical education standards, as well as the registration and professional conduct of the country’s doctors. The Medical Council of India—reconstituted under this legislation— formulated the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002. Although the council was dissolved in 2020 and replaced by the National Medical Commission, these rules continue to be in effect.
According to Clause 7.16 of these regulations: “Before performing an operation the physician should obtain in writing the consent from the husband or wife, parent or guardian in the case of minor, or the patient himself as the case may be.”
This effectively means that the state excludes queer partners who do not have the right to marry. The regulation creates an “artificial hierarchy in law where someone who is heterosexual and married is privileged in all decisions,” Kanmani, a transwoman lawyer who practices in the Supreme Court and Madras High Court, told queerbeat.
The implications threaten the lives of queer people. At the peak of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Prasanna, a 35-year-old gay man then based in Chennai, contracted the infection. His oxygen saturation levels dropped to 88 percent, the minimum saturation level for a healthy adult is about 95 percent.
Prasanna was in dire need of hospitalisation. In that season of mayhem, like thousands of Indians across the country, he and his partner of over 18 years scrambled to find a hospital bed. But when they found one, Prasanna wasn’t able to access it. His partner was not eligible to sign the requisite hospital forms for admissions on Prasanna’s behalf.
“The forms were to only be signed by parents, spouses, or guardians,” Prasanna told queerbeat. Desperate, the couple took a taxi to Vellore—nearly 150 kilometres away—where Prasanna’s parents lived. He was admitted to a hospital there; his parents signed the forms. Within a day, Prasanna was shifted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), where he spent the next ten days.
“It was a huge shock for us and it gave us the perspective that even though we co-own a house, live under the same roof, my partner has no form of legality,” Prasanna said. He had a support system, parents who were accessible, and the ability to travel in a short period of time, he added. “If that wasn’t the case, the situation could have been extremely tricky.”
The Supreme Court recognises the right of queer persons to be in romantic relationships, but it does not seem to recognise or grant protections to any of the rights that flow from the relationship, Chand pointed out. Arshiya and she are fighting against the “void that happens in the absence of laws,” Chand said. “You have to navigate through systems and find ways around it. Why should one have to do that?”
Arshiya and Chand decided to challenge this loss of agency in the courts. “We need not wait for a medical emergency to happen before we get the right,” Chand said.
In July 2025, Arshiya filed a petition in the Delhi High Court, underscoring the “critical need for the recognition of their union in medical contexts.” The petition pointed out that Chand’s immediate family members lived in other states and countries, which made them potentially inaccessible during an emergency, and emphasised Arshiya’s “indispensable role as her partner’s decision-maker.”
The mandate for familial or spousal consent makes matters especially precarious for queer persons, many of whom endure estrangements from their natal families. The petition highlights this vulnerability. It notes that the official insistence on such narrow forms of recognition “fails to take into account the fact that several members of the LGBTQIA+ [community] face alienation/strained relationship with their blood family, and may want non-family members, who would in fact be better placed to take crucial decisions on behalf of such person, to be their representative in dire moments.”
In cases that require serious medical interventions such as blood transfusions, hospitalisation in ICUs, intubation, or life support, hospitals tend to privilege the consent of the natal family, Gargi Dhananjayan, a trans non-binary independent medical practitioner based in Chennai, told queerbeat. “This poses challenges for runaway queer and trans persons,” they said.
Although Gargi was unsure of whether a favourable judgment in this petition would have far-reaching consequences, they said that it addressed a major hindrance in securing the health rights of queer persons.
Arshiya’s petition echoes this urgency. It frames the mandate as a violation of several constitutional rights: Article 14, the right to equality; Article 19, the freedom of speech and expression; and Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty.
If a person is unable to choose which medical procedures they will undergo through someone they trust, it is clearly violative of Article 21, senior Delhi High Court lawyer Saurabh Kirpal, one of the advocates representing Arshiya, told queerbeat. The mandate also clearly discriminates against queer people, in violation of Article 14, Saurabh added, since “if you are a straight person, you have the right to marry and therefore have a person you trust, decide for you.”
The mandate also runs afoul of the doctrine of arbitrariness—a component of Article 14—which protects Indian citizens against unreasonable behaviour by state authorities. “There’s absolutely no rationale as to why you cannot take a decision about your own medical health in advance, or about who you want to make those decisions for you,” Saurabh said. “There is no state interest in saying the doctor or the state will decide whether you get operated on, or whether you will receive certain treatments, as opposed to someone you love. It’s completely irrational.”
The regulation doesn’t only violate the Constitution, it also contravenes international treaties and frameworks that India is bound by, the petition points out. These include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (General Comment No. 14, 2000), and the Yogyakarta Principles (2006), which address human rights standards related to sexual orientation and gender identity.
Queer people could potentially exercise their right to make health-care decisions for each other through a medical power of attorney—which legally empowers an individual to make decisions for another. But this right is not legally enforceable in medical situations unless court-ordered, all three lawyers interviewed by queerbeat said. Then there is the problem of accessibility. “How many people know the concept of a will, let alone a power of attorney?” Kanmani asked.
Arshiya feels “infuriated” that queer persons have to negotiate with the state for everyday rights easily available to heterosexual persons. But she is channelling her frustrations on moving the needle, inch-by-inch. It is like “removing one brick at a time rather than breaking the entire wall at once,” Kanmani said.
“If marriage equality has to be achieved, it has to be achieved by the will of the people and by a social movement. But our rights cannot wait until that day comes,” Chand told queerbeat.
“This is not merely a legal battle,” the petition points out. “But a deeply human struggle, rooted in the universal desire to care for and protect one’s partner in union.”