India’s top court on Thursday overturned a 157-year-old law criminalizing gay sex in a landmark victory for gay rights in the world’s largest democracy. A panel of five judges issued a unanimous judgment striking down the provision and affirming the right to equality and dignity. “Respect for individual choice is the essence of liberty,” Dipak Misra, India’s chief justice, told a packed courtroom. “This freedom can only be fulfilled when each of us realizes that the LGBT community possesses equal rights.” Activists have struggled for more than a decade to invalidate Section 377 of the Indian penal code, a provision that dates to the colonial era. The law prohibited consensual “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.”