Record turnout for gay pride march in Mumbai

Some 5,000 people turned out for the first LGBT pride march in the country held after the Supreme Court in December reinstated a colonial-era law that criminalises gay sex.

t was a record turnout for Mumbai’s seventh gay pride parade where some 5,000 people marched from August Kranti Marg to Girgaum Chowpatty on Saturday afternoon, according to organisers.

Pallav Patankar, co-organiser of the parade and director of HIV services at Humsafar Trust, a Mumbai-based LGBT community organisation, told Gay Star News that “Mumbai has woken up to the fact that it has LGBTcitizens” and that members of the LGBT community are now more “hopeful and willing to fight it out by interfacing with politicians and speaking about queer rights” than before.

In 2009 the Delhi High Court declared section 377, a law which criminalises “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and widely interpreted to refer to gay sex, to be unconstitutional. Violation of the law can be punished with up to 10 years in jail.

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