Allahabad High Court upholds minor girl's marriage as legal
The order pronounced by a bench comprising Justices Ajai Lamba and Ashok Pal Singh could have wide-ranging ramifications in the interpretation of the Hindu Marriage Act if the technicality of age could be overlooked due to other circumstances.
Is the marriage of a minor girl legal under the Hindu Marriage Act 1955? The obvious answer would be a resounding "no". However, in a landmark judgment, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has ruled in one peculiar case that the minor girl's marriage could not be termed void ab initio (not maintainable since the very beginning) only because she was below 18 years of age.
The order pronounced by a bench comprising Justices Ajai Lamba and Ashok Pal Singh could have wide-ranging ramifications in the interpretation of the Hindu Marriage Act if the technicality of age could be overlooked due to other circumstances.
The order was passed on a petition moved by the girl through her husband. It stated that she was being forcibly kept in a women's protection home on an order passed by the magistrate in a lower court. She said that she was being held under duress and that she should be allowed to live with her husband whom she had married out of her free will.
The court ordered that the girl be released immediately as keeping her at the women's home violated her freedom as guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. The court observed that merely because the girl was a minor, the fact that she was now married could not be denied. The judges upheld the marriage as legal and valid.
In her petition, the girl had stated that her father and brother wanted to marry her off to a much older man for a sum of Rs 50,000. When she eloped and married the man of her choice, they had lodged an FIR in the Imaliya Sultanpur police station of Sitapur district in central UP alleging that the girl had been abducted.
The girl was soon caught and produced before a magistrate who sent her to the Rajkiya Mahila Sharanalaya, Lucknow.
The girl then moved a petition seeking issuance of a writ of habeas corpus directing the Rajkiya Mahila Sharanalaya to release the detenue. The judges opined "that liberty of the petitioner has been curtailed without any legal cause" and ordered her immediate release.