Nandakumar & Anr. v. The State of Kerala & Ors.
Background
A man married a woman at a temple in Kerala; she was 19 (above the legal marriageable age for women) but he was under 21, the minimum marriageable age for men under the Hindu Marriage Act. The woman's father filed a habeas corpus petition in the Kerala High Court, alleging his daughter was being illegally held by the husband, and the High Court, after concluding the marriage was invalid because the husband was underage, ordered the woman's "custody" to be handed back to her father. The husband appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing the High Court had wrongly treated an adult woman's living arrangements as a question of "custody" at all.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that even if the marriage were defective because the husband had not reached 21, under the Hindu Marriage Act such a marriage is at most "voidable," not automatically void, and in any event, the key point was that both the man and the woman were legally adults. As adults, they had a constitutional right under Articles 19 and 21 to live together, married or not (live-in relationships are themselves recognised in law), and a father cannot be given "custody" of an adult daughter who has not been shown to be illegally detained. Relying heavily on its own recent ruling in Shafin Jahan vs Asokan K.M. (the "Hadiya" case) about the primacy of an adult's right to choose a partner, the Court set aside the High Court's order, while directing that since the wife had not herself been made a party to these proceedings, she remains free to decide for herself with whom she wishes to live.
Lesson Learnt
Once a person reaches adulthood, no court can treat them as someone else's "custody" to be handed over to a parent merely because the family disapproves of their choice of partner: the freedom to choose whom to live with or marry is a constitutionally protected right of every adult.