Sumit Baudh

Sumit Baudh is a lawyer, academic, and activist, known for his scholarship and advocacy on LGBT and Dalit issues in India.

Baudh obtained an honours degree in Law and Arts from the National Law School of India and then a Masters (LLM) degree from the London School of Economics. He then graduated from the Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) program at the UCLA School of Law.

, Baudh is an Associate Professor at the O. P. Jindal Global University law school, where he also serves as the Executive Director of the Centre on Public Law and Jurisprudence. He has also been a fellow with the Transnational Law Institute at the King's College London (2016), research fellow at Columbia Law School (2015), Human Rights Fellow at the University of California (2014), and a fellow at UCLA School of Law (2014-14). He has also worked with United Nations Development Programme, CARE India, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and the AMAN Trust.

Baudh's scholarship examines issues relating to human rights, sexuality, and colonial homophobic sodomy laws and their impacts across South Asia.

Section 377

Baudh is gay and a Dalit. Baudh has been involved with, and sometimes described as the nodal person of, the Voices Against 377, an advocacy organisation working against Section 377 of The INDIAN Penal Code, which criminalised homosexual [...] activities. The Times of India described Voices Against 377 as "one of the organisations that has filed an intervention application in the high court seeking a 'reading down' of the law."

Arts

Baudh is also an artist whose work includes "sound sculpture" and "photo performance." His work has been exhibited in India and the United States.