Anand Grover Biography 
Anand Grover is a senior lawyer known for legal activism in Indian law. He fights for legal cases and subjects relating to homosexuality and HIV. His wife Indira Jaising is an advocate of the Supreme Court of India and a human rights activist too. She is the first woman senior advocate to be designated by the Bombay High Court, the first Indian woman to be elected to the U.N. Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and also the first woman to be appointed Additional Solicitor General. They together founded Lawyers Collective in 1981, a NGO devoted to feminist and left-wing causes. He has been appointed as one of India's additional solicitor generals in the late 2000s.
He was the driving force behind the historic judgement that effectively decriminalised homosexuality by 'reading down' section 377 in 2009. It was a result of more than 20 years of efforts and setbacks which led to this historic judgement. He was so obsessed with the topic that in the period between 1993 and 1997 he was doing up to four HIV-related cases per month pro bono. Grover and Indira Jaisingh founded The Lawyers Collective in 1981 to help the marginalised and poor. Same year he began his law studies too. He owned a degree in biochemistry which he completed from England 10 years ago.
Grover's first HIV case followed in 1988, but he lost the case. But it helped him to realize that HIV is as much a legal and human rights issue as a medical and social one. Shortly before the death of HIV-positive activist Dominic D'Souza in 1992, whose case Grover took in 1988, D'Souza extracted a promise from Grover to continue doing legal work for HIV rights. Since then he has fought for cases related to homosexuality and HIV. Grover expressed disappointment and unhappiness over the judgement of death sentence and execution of Yakub Memon, who was convicted for 1993 Bombay blasts.
Published: October 16, 2018
Updated: October 16, 2018
