INVOCKING the Supreme Court’s judgments on the right to privacy and the Hadiya case, the Delhi High Court on Wednesday reunited a 23-year-old woman with her music teacher and ordered stringent action against cops, doctors of a private mental hospital and an ambulance service who with the help of her parents abducted and confined her in hospital.
The HC rejected strong opposition from the woman’s father, who claimed she was mentally unsound and allowed her to return to live with the music teacher and his wife who had taught her since she was 11.
A bench of Justices S Muralidhar and C Hari Shankar noted that the plea before the court was that the woman should be protected against the coercive retributive action of her parents for making personal life choices. The court recognized that “the threat to the right of choice of a person, and thereby right to life, liberty, and dignity, can very well come from the person’s own parents…”
Compensate girl for violation of her rights to life, liberty: HC
The court also ordered an inquiry against policemen of Malviya Nagar station who helped the parents, pointing out that “when a group of persons barges into a house, pins down a person forcibly, injects her with a sedative and tries to take her away in an ambulance, a policeman cannot possibly be under the bona fide belief that all this was done in her best interest.”
Appalled at the widespread connivance of police, doctors and ambulance service with the parents, HC also awarded the girl, dubbed Z, compensation to be paid by each of these persons who violated her “fundamental rights to life, liberty and the right to dignity enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution.”
The court found serious lapses by the Cosmos Institute of Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences (CIMBS), Delhi Psychiatry Centre, a private mental health facility in the city which admitted the woman against her wishes.
It asked the Medical Council of India to take action against Dr. Sunil Mittal, Dr. Sameer Kalani and Dr. Raj Mishra of CIMBS, for “serious breach of the law and professional ethics.”
HC was also surprised at the role of Almas Ambulance Service in which Z was bundled off by her parents from the music teacher’s house with help of the cops. HC found the owner of the service, Abdul Gaffar, was an Ayurveda practitioner. It directed the Delhi government to immediately cancel the ambulance service’s license.
HC’s intervention and directions came on a habeas corpus petition filed by the music teacher who told the court that Z was living with him and wife since she was 18 years old and had been learning Hindustani classical music from both of them since the age of 11.
Due to her interest in pursuing a career in classical music, she was unable to get along with her parents and her brother and had voluntarily moved in with the teachers. But on June 11 last year, she was forcibly taken away from their Khirki Extension residence.
By LAWRATO.COM