India's Supreme Court is revisiting the doctrine of 'constitutional morality' — a principle central to its landmark 2018 Navtej Singh Johar judgment that decriminalised consensual same-sex relations by striking down Section 377 IPC. The current judicial exercise may determine whether constitutional morality can extend LGBTQ protections further, including rights to marriage, adoption, and non-discrimination. The five-judge Constitution Bench that decided Navtej explicitly elevated constitutional morality over popular morality as a guiding interpretive standard.

Constitutional morality, as articulated by B.R. Ambedkar in the Constituent Assembly debates, means adherence to the letter and spirit of the Constitution rather than to the prevailing social consensus. The Supreme Court revived this doctrine in the Navtej Singh Johar case (2018) to hold that criminalising consensual adult same-sex relations violated Articles 14 (equality), 15 (non-discrimination), 19 (expression), and 21 (dignity and privacy). The Court drew heavily on Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the nine-judge Privacy Bench ruling, which established privacy as a fundamental right intrinsic to personal liberty under Article 21.

The critical current question is: can constitutional morality now compel the State to affirmatively recognise same-sex marriage or civil unions? In Supriyo v. Union of India (2023), a five-judge Constitution Bench declined to grant the right to same-sex marriage, saying Parliament — not the Court — must legislate. However, it did not foreclose future claims. The dissenting opinion by Justice S.K. Kaul explicitly called for a civil union framework.

For CLAT PG aspirants, the doctrinal scaffolding — constitutional morality vs. popular morality, the Puttaswamy privacy chain, Article 21 expansionism, and the limits of judicial review vis-à-vis parliamentary supremacy — forms the analytical core of likely passage questions. For UPSC, the tension between judicial interpretation and majoritarian democracy, and India's obligations under international human rights law, frame the static hinterland.