NEW DELHI: Parliamentarians from India’s right-wing government on Friday blocked a private member’s bill to decriminalize homosexuality.

Shashi Tharoor, a lawmaker from the opposition Congress party, sought to table a bill to amend section 377 of the Indian penal code, which bans homosexual acts as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.”

But the move failed after the lower house of Parliament, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party holds a majority, voted 71-24 against it, while others walked out.