Right to choose a partner of choice a fundamental right: Allahabad High Court

New Delhi: In an important ruling amid states' bid to bring in laws for "love-jihad", the Allahabad High Court has held that the "right to live with a person of his/her choice irrespective of religion professed by them, is intrinsic to right to life and personal liberty.

A bench of Justices Pankaj Naqvi and Vivek Agarwal remarked, "We fail to understand that if the law permits two persons even of the same sex to live together peacefully then neither any individual nor a family nor even the state can have an objection to the relationship of two major individuals who out of their own free will are living together," accordingly legal website Live Law.

The judgment was delivered on November 11 in a case where Salamat Ansari had got married to Priyanka Kharwar, who had then willingly changed her religion to Islam. However, Priyanka's father had filed a police case accusing Salamat of a horde of crimes including under the POCSO Act.

The court firstly noted that the issue of the woman's age was settled and she was a major at the time she left home. It then went on to say that it does not see the two petitioners as Hindu or Muslim but as two "grown-up individuals" living together peacefully and happily for a year now of their own free will.

Significantly, the court also observed that the recent judgments holding that religious conversion just for the purpose of marriage were "bad in law". In two of these orders, the court noted that a constitutional court should have considered the wishes of the women involved as they were both above 18 years of age.

The court thus quashed the FIR against Salamat and said it was up to the woman to decide if she wanted to meet her father.