Faulting Police For ‘Investigating Marriages’, Allahabad HC Affirms Right to Choose One's Partner
New Delhi: Quashing a kidnapping FIR in a case where the couple concerned said they got married of their own volition, the Allahabad high court chided the police for “virtually investigating marriages instead of crimes” and affirmed that adults have the right to choose their life partners.
A bench of Justices Tarun Saxena and J.J. Munir also directed Uttar Pradesh's director general of police and its additional chief secretary for home to take remedial measures in this regard “before we are compelled to step in”.
Police in Saharanpur lodged the kidnapping FIR in December after the complainant – the woman petitioner's father – said she had left home with the co-petitioner in the matter. The case was registered on the same day the couple got married.
However the bench ruled in its order issued on Tuesday and uploaded on Thursday (April 23) that the most the father could have done in these circumstances was to file a missing report. “There was no occasion to register a crime. Nevertheless, the impugned FIR, that is a cognisable case, has been registered and the police are chasing the couple,” it said.
It perused the woman's high school certificate and noted that she is an adult, in addition to recording her statement in court that she would like to live with her husband and not her father. The couple also submitted a joint affidavit to the effect that they are living together peacefully.
Deeming the FIR to be a “serious inroad” into the couple's personal liberty, the bench said that “no one has business to tell a major, where he or she will stay, or with whom he or she will live, marry or spend his or her life.”
In more pointed remarks on the police's conduct, it added: “We find a disturbing trend these days where the police, as in the present case, are registering FIRs and chasing couples virtually investigating marriages, instead of investigating crimes with which their hands are full. They are wasting their time in business which is not theirs.”
Moreover by filing such cases, sometimes with the “ulterior motive to forcibly separate [couples] and send back the bride to the parents or her family”, the police are indulging in actions that are “absolutely illegal”, the judges said.
“A message should also go out now to every citizen in the country that the age of majority has to be respected and so also the constitutional culture. The Constitution does not permit an adult, whatever be the relationship, to dominate or rule over the will of another adult, who is a major under the law,” the bench underlined.
Earlier this month the Allahabad high court had pointed to another “disturbing trend”, wherein third parties file complaints and FIRs are then lodged under the state's anti-unlawful conversion law. It made these remarks in a case where the police continued to investigate a Muslim man under the controversial statute and some BNS provisions even after the woman said she was in a consensual relationship with him.
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