The Bombay high court has reunited a Hindu-Muslim couple, which was separated by the girl’s parents.
The Bombay high court has reunited a Hindu-Muslim couple, which was separated by the girl’s parents. The couple, hailing from Rajasthan, had eloped and got married but the girl was taken away by her parents and forcibly married off to another man later.
The husband had filed a habeas corpus petition in the Bombay high court claiming that he received a telephone call from his wife saying that she was being kept in wrongful confinement at a place in Rajasthan.
His story is that the woman — who is from the minority community —fell in love with him and they eloped from their village in Rajasthan.
They went to Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh where they got married on June 8 this year, as per Hindu rites.
However, the girl’s relatives took her away to her parents’ house on the pretext that she would be brought back to her matrimonial home in Madhya Pradesh. Later, she was forced to marry another man in Gujarat.
In the meantime, the petitioner moved to Mumbai and filed a police complaint at Ambarnath town in the Thane district stating that his wife, who was pregnant with his child, was missing.
He urged the police to trace her and bring her back. However, the police could not find her and hence he moved the high court requesting it to direct the police to find her.
He also informed the court about receiving his wife’s phone call from Rajasthan.
The court then directed the Rajasthan police to visit the woman’s house and produce her before it. Accordingly, she was produced before the bench on November 23.
Acting on the court’s order, the Rajasthan police produced the woman on November 23 before the bench of justices Ranjit More and Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi.
The judges then asked the woman whether she wished to go back to her parents or stay with her husband who had filed the habeas corpus petition.
To this, she replied that her choice would be to join her husband in Mumbai to whom she was married earlier.
The bench then ordered that the couple be reunited and allowed them to stay together.
