No Marriage Law, Three Ministries Anyway - India's Quiet Answer to a Court That Punted

THE COURT SAID "NOT US"

• THREE MINISTRIES ARE ANSWERING ANYWAY The Supreme Court's 2023 verdict in Supriya Chakraborty v. Union of India is usually summarised as a refusal - the Court declined to read marriage equality into the Special Marriage Act, holding that was Parliament's job, not the judiciary's. What gets underplayed is the second half of that judgment: the bench also directed the government to resolve the everyday civil difficulties queer couples actually face. Three years on, that direction is being answered not through legislation, but through a growing stack of ministry-specific carve-outs - and the Health Ministry's Delhi High Court affidavit is the newest one. The pattern, read together Individually, each concession looks narrow. The Finance Ministry cleared joint bank accounts in 2024. The Department of Food and Public Distribution let same-sex couples register as a single household for ration cards. Now the Health Ministry has told a court that a "non-heterosexual/queer relationship" cannot be a disqualifying factor for someone nominated as a medical decision-maker under the Mental Healthcare Act, 2017 - a statute that already permits "any person," not just a blood relative or spouse, to hold that role. None of these required new law. Each simply extended an existing, already-flexible statutory category to include same-sex partners. Why this is a genuine model, not just delay Call this administrative inclusion: government departments individually recognising functional relationships - care, dependence, mutual responsibility - without touching the legal definition of marriage itself. It is a real institutional strategy, not merely evasion. The Health Ministry's own affidavit language makes the logic explicit: nominating a partner for medical decisions is "a logical and tailored extension" of the same principle already applied to bank accounts and ration cards. That is a government building policy by analogy, ministry by ministry, rather than by statute. Where the model still breaks down The strategy has a visible limit: it only works where an existing law already has a flexible, non-marital category to extend - "any person" under mental healthcare law, "household" under food distribution rules. Where the law hardcodes "spouse" as strictly heterosexual, as the Income Tax Act does for gift-tax exemptions, the same ministries that expand access elsewhere have actively opposed same-sex couples in court. Administrative inclusion, in other words, is bounded by drafting accidents in unrelated statutes - not by any coherent government position on same-sex partnership. For the exam, the sharper framing isn't "India is slowly recognising queer rights." It's that India has chosen a specific institutional design - extend existing flexible categories administratively, leave the core legal definition of marriage untouched - and that design's coverage is a function of how each individual statute happens to be worded, not of any unified civil-rights principle. That's worth naming precisely, because it explains exactly why gains in health and banking coexist with continued exclusion in tax law.