New Delhi: A division bench of the Allahabad High Court on Wednesday, 11 November, held that two previous orders by single judges of the court, which had said that conversion purely for the sake of marriage was illegal, were not good law.
“Right to live with a person of his/her choice irrespective of religion professed by them, is intrinsic to the right to life and personal liberty,” the two-judge bench held, adding that “Interference in a personal relationship would constitute a serious encroachment into the right to freedom of choice of the two individuals.”
The HC asserts that the matter of a religious conversion is irrelevant if both the parties are adults and in a consenting relationship. The right of two adults to stay together cannot be encroached upon by the state.
The order of the court comes at a crucial moment, when those previous high court orders were being cited by BJP leaders like UP CM Yogi Adityanath and Karnataka BJP leader CT Ravi to justify the need for laws to tackle ‘Love Jihad’, despite the flaws in those orders and the lack of legal basis for any such laws.
‘Earlier Verdicts Were Not Laying Good Law’: HC
The division bench of Justices Vivek Agarwal and Pankaj Naqvi held that the two previous orders – one passed in September, and the other in 2014 – as “not laying good law”.
The High Court observed, “None of these judgments dealt with the issue of life and liberty of two matured individuals in choosing a partner or their right to freedom of choice as to with whom they would like to live.
We hold the judgments in Noor Jahan and Priyanshi as not laying good law.”In arriving at this conclusion, the judges referred to the Supreme Court’s judgments in the Hadiya case, the Shakti Vahini case (on honour killings) and of course the landmark right to privacy case.
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