For Saurabh Kirpal, the virtues of patience have never been so confounding. The Supreme Court advocate would have become India’s first openly gay High Court judge; the promotion that’s eluded him since 2017. The recommendation had first come from the collegium of the SC, but the decision was deferred three times, with sources claiming that the government had marked Kirpal’s partner, a Swiss foreign national, as a “security risk”. Kirpal, who is the son of former Chief Justice of India Bhupinder Nath Kirpal, feels otherwise—it’s his sexual orientation. “When I accepted the offer to being elevated, I knew this would not be an easy task. This was five years ago, before the judgment in the Section 377 case [decrimimalising same sex among consenting adults]. The fact that there would be pulls and pressures was something I was ready for. I didn’t go into this blind... I have seen how politics works. I know how the courts, the collegium system and the government operate. What I wasn’t ready for, was the sheer extent of time it has taken,” he tells mid-day in this telephonic interview.

Last year, Kirpal’s name was recommended by the collegium again, but nothing has moved since. “In all of this, I have tried to keep a sane and cool head. If you dwell on what you perceive to be a delay, you would be bogged down, and unable to bring in other changes that you wish to. This is one aspect of what my life is. And I don’t let it rule every other part of me. I am compartmentalising to some extent. There’s no point worrying about it too much,” he shares.