When does an adult become an adult, free to make their own decisions and choose their own love, life, and future? India allows its youth to decide its political future from the age of 18, and yet family, society and the state too often infantilise and deny the same adults their rights and their agency.
A recent case in point is a Madras High Court ruling on a habeas corpus petition. The female petitioner was the partner of a young woman in her 20s who was allegedly illegally confined by her parents. Complaints to the police about her fate had gone in vain. Finally, at court, the woman’s mother told the judges that the petitioner had led her daughter astray.
The court, noting that every parent cannot be like the late Justice Leila Seth, who openly accepted and advocated for her gay son (celebrated writer Vikram Seth), allowed the woman to go with the petitioner just as she had preferred. In handling the case, the court relied on Supreme Court guidelines from only last year in dealing with habeas petitions and pleas for police protection. Those guidelines also came from a similar case; only there, the Kerala High Court, instead of going by the preference of the woman detained by her parents, sent her for counselling.
It is not only in cases of LGBTQIA+ couples that matters have devolved into parental confinement and adults have had to turn to the courts for respite. The famous Hadiya case is one example of how the agency and rights of young people, especially women, are denied at the altar of parental preferences and societal compulsions.
The Madras High Court rightly pointed out that couples, cisgender heterosexual or otherwise, have the right to form their own families even outside the scope of traditional marriages. Yet, in India, gender, sexuality, caste and religion are grounds on which families and societies keep consenting adults apart, often violently and fatally.
Worse, however, is the willingness of police and even the judiciary to back these antiquated notions and support errant parents rather than upholding the rights of consenting adults as guaranteed by the Constitution. Until that changes, judgments can set free individuals to live and love fully, only one at a time.