India stands on the brink of the greatest breakthrough for gay rights since the country’s independence, activists say, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether homosexuality is illegal. While the LGBT+ rights movement has progressed in leaps and bounds across the Western world in recent decades, India remains one of a large minority of countries – around 40 per cent – that still criminalises consensual same-sex relations between adults. A decision to decriminalise gay sex would have wide and far-reaching implications, not just for the status of the LGBT+ minority in India, but also for other countries across the Commonwealth that still enshrine this element of 150-year-old Victorian morality in their laws.