Bombay HC reunites Hindu-Muslim couple from Rajasthan

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court has reunited a Hindu-Muslim couple from Rajasthan, after the woman was taken away by her parents and forcibly married-off to another man later.

Rajasthan Police produced the woman on November 23 before a bench of justices Ranjit More and Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi on a Habeas Corpus petition filed by her husband (to whom the woman got married earlier).

The woman from the minority community fell in love with a Hindu man 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 woman'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.

Meanwhile, the man (to whom she was married earlier) moved to Mumbai and filed a police complaint at Ambarnath town in nearby 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.

As police could not find the woman, the husband filed a Habeas Corpus petition in the High Court urging that police may be asked to find her.

The petitioner told the High Court that he received a telephone call from his wife saying that she was kept in wrongful confinement at a place in Rajasthan. The HC 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.

The judges 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.