10.4 Unnatural Sexual Offences

The provision (the Code's scheme): the Code retains an offence of unnatural sexual conduct — the actus classically defined against the "order of nature," including expressly bestiality, and in its historical application same-sex conduct (the Ain-era predecessor's inheritance). The rights controversy (the unit's unavoidable analysis): The Supreme Court's Pant decision (2007) — the third-gender-recognition line — directed the government to consider decriminalizing same-sex conduct and to recognize sexual minorities' rights (the constitutional dignity reasoning); The Constitution of Nepal (2015) — citizenship on the basis of gender identity, the equality and non-discrimination guarantees read by advocates against "unnatural offence" enforcement; The Code's retention (2074) — the compromise criticized from both directions; The comparative trend: the Indian Supreme Court's Navtej Singh Johar (2018) reading down the IPC's Section 377 (the subcontinent's constitutional privacy-dignity landmark); the world's decriminalization wave; The exam-safe formulation: state the provision, the Pant jurisprudence, the constitutional guarantees, and the comparative trajectory — argue both the enforcement reality (rarely enforced against consensual adult conduct) and the text's continued chill; avoid asserting outcomes the courts have not yet pronounced.