‘We feel distanced from the world’: Lesbian couple die by suicide
A lesbian couple and one of their daughters have died by suicide, writing in their farewell note that “the world did not let them live.”
The couple, Asha Thakor and Bhavna Thakor, lived in the Ahmedabad region in India.
The Deccan Herald reported that in a bid to be together the women took their lives by drowning. The women also took the life of one of the women’s daughters, a three-year-old named Megha.
(SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty)Leaving a suicide note along the riverfront’s concrete walkway, they wrote that they had “distanced themselves from the world so they could unite, but the world did not let them live.”
The couple carried out a relationship while one of the partners was married to a man and had three-year-old Megha with him.
A police official said the women experienced “complications arising out of their lesbian relationship.”
He also confirmed that the women both worked at the same private company at Rajoda village in the Ahmedabad district.
It is not currently known which of the pair was married to a man and had a three-year-old daughter with him.
The Indian government has been asked to give its views on the country’s anti-gay sodomy law ahead of a Supreme Court challenge.
India’s Section 377 is one of the British colonial laws criminalising homosexuality (Getty)
Colonial-era penal code Section 377, which criminalises sex “against the order of nature,” has widely been used to clamp down on the LGBT community in India.
The challenge to the law, which has been brought by 33-year-old hotel owner Keshav Suri, hopes to overturn the legislation.
(Getty)
Suri’s representative Mukul Rohatgi said: “Persons from the LGBTQ community are ridiculed in various spheres of life. Equal work opportunities and pay is not given to individuals who have chosen their sexual orientation which is called ‘different.’
“The petitioner himself has suffered mentally and been stigmatised on account of his sexual orientation at personal and professional fronts. He had to deal with non-acceptance of his fundamental and intrinsic choice that is his homosexuality with his family and thereafter even professionally questions were raised about his sexuality, which does not normally happen with heterosexual individuals.”
