Policing Intimacy: A Critical Analysis of Commissionerate Police Powers and Same Sex Relationships in Urban India

Abstract

The decriminalisation of consensual same-sex conduct in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018) removed the primary formal instrument through which police targeted sexual minorities in India. What it did not remove was the institutional architecture that had enabled that targeting for over a century and a half. This article examines how Commissionerate police structures in major Indian cities continue to exercise a range of executive powers, including preventive detention, public nuisance regulation, licensing authority, and extern orders, in ways that reproduce the practical effects of criminalisation without engaging its formal language. Drawing on constitutional doctrine, legal sociology, and ethnographic accounts from urban queer communities, the article argues that the persistence of this regulatory harassment reflects a deeper conflict between the transformative potential of constitutional privacy and dignity guarantees and the colonial-era administrative DNA of urban policing in India. The article concludes with a framework for institutional reform oriented toward accountability rather than aspiration.