Leila Seth is 83. Energetic and engaging, she has a dazzling smile and a regal bearing. Diminutive, she stands tall in any gathering.

She was the first woman to top the London Bar exams (1958). She was the first woman judge named to the prestigious Delhi High Court (1978). She was the first woman chief justice of an Indian state (1991). As a member of the Law Commission of India she helped change the Hindu Succession Act to confer equal property rights on daughters. A human-rights activist, she campaigns for gays, like her son, the famous authorVikram Seth (A Suitable Boy).

She lives in New Delhi, the capital. At a party there in January, I suggested that she’d make an ideal first president of the newly established Delhi PEN Centre, the latest of 148 centres in 106 countries belonging to PEN International, the free speech group.

She said she couldn’t — too many other commitments wouldn’t allow her to give her usual “110 per cent.” I said, 60 per cent would do — we’d find others to assist her.

“I don’t do it like that,” she said.

A few days later, she had a bylined article in the Times of India, “A mother and a judge speaks out on Section 377.”

That part of the Indian Penal Code (a British colonial era law still on the books) prohibits “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal,” punishable by jail of 10 years to life.

In 2009, the Delhi High Court had ruled the section unconstitutional. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community celebrated. Many came out of the closet.

But the ruling was challenged by a dozen religious and political groups. The Supreme Court heard the appeal in early 2012. Twenty-one months later, in December last year, it shocked many by reinstating Section 377, thereby recriminalizing private, adult consensual sex acts.

Leila Seth was outraged.

“Vikram is now a criminal, an unapprehended felon,” she wrote in the article that was at once emotional and clinical, and which has since been widely republished. “If Vikram falls in love with another man, he will be committing a crime punishable by imprisonment if he expresses his love physically.”

She said the judgment was inhumane, immoral and illogical, most notably in arguing that the issue affected only a fraction of the population. “In fact, the numbers are not small.” Even if they were, “the court could not abdicate its responsibilities to protect their fundamental rights or shuffle them off to parliament,” a reference to the court’s suggestion that the government could change the law, if it wished.

The chances of that were slim to none in the run-up to the election, now underway. They would be less than zero should the conservative Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party emerge the winner May 16 — its platform specifically backs Section 377.

On another front, though, the Supreme Court proved liberal. This month, it recognized transgender people as a third gender — they would no longer have to identify themselves as male or female in official documents.

The court ordered the government to provide the group with quotas in jobs and education (as it does with some other minorities), provide them social services and initiate public awareness campaigns to lessen thesocial stigma against them.

Estimated at 2 million, they are widely reviled — Hindus among them are not allowed in some parts of the country to cremate their dead during daytime. Most live on the fringes of society, surviving through prostitution, aggressive begging or dancing at weddings and other social occasions.

India has been a deeply conservative society. A 3,000-year-old civilization — layered by religion, region, language, ethnicity, caste, creed, cultures and customs — it has been held together over the centuries by strict social mores. But the codes were hierarchical, patriarchal and homophobic, which meant that the societal order came at the expense of certain segments of the populace. With the end of the British colonial rule in 1947 and the remarkable development of democracy since, distinctions of class have been giving way to egalitarianism. Now as urban India undergoes a social transformation, several taboo topics are being hauled out of the closet.

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Oppression of women has been front and centre of public debate. Other long-accepted discriminations are now being challenged.

Haroon Siddiqui, a former member of the board of PEN International, is a member of its centres development committee. He writes Thursdays and Sundays. hsiddiqui@thestar.ca