Habeas Corpus

Juridical
Narratives
of Sexual
Governance

Pratiksha Baxi

WORKING PAPER SERIES

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi CSLG/WP/09
HABEAS CORPUS
Juridical Narratives of Sexual Governance

Pratiksha Baxi

WORKING PAPER SERIES

Centre for the Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

April 2009 [Reprint 2012]

CSLG/WP/09
Pratiksha Baxi joined the Centre for the Study of Law and
Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University as Assistant Professor in
2006. She holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the Department
of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Her
research areas are sociology of law, feminist theory and anthropology
of violence. She has published on sexual harassment, rape, sexual
governance, medical jurisprudence, judicial reform and communal
violence. Her forthcoming book Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in
India is based on an ethnographic study of rape trials in a district court
in Gujarat (Oxford University Press, 2013). Pratiksha has been granted
fellowships at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Recht als Kultur (Bonn),
University of Zurich and Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore). She
was also awarded the Hermès-postdoctoral fellowship (2010) and
British Academy Visiting Fellowship (2006). Pratiksha anchors the
Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSnet).
HABEAS CORPUS
Juridical Narratives of Sexual Governance

Pratiksha Baxi1

Introduction

T he discussion on habeas corpus, a legal term that literally

means produce the body or the person detained in court, has
ordinarily been evoked in discussions on political prisoners
and illegal detention of subjects in state institutions in India. This
discussion has eclipsed the routine use of the writ in the domestic
realm. Yet procedural legality is a site where issues of substantive
justice are regularly adjudicated. In this paper, I wish to point to the
way people use the writ of habeas corpus in a domain of everyday
life considered to be private, intimate and opaque to law. The paper

1 I am grateful to the Ford Visiting Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Law
and Governance, JNU (July to December 2005) for giving me the opportunity
to research this paper. Bharti Mohan helped me collect the material cited in this
paper. Uma Chakravarti has been an important interlocutor during this research and
pointed my attention to some key judgments. I also thank Julian Ronald Moti, Jaivir
Singh, Shirin Rai, Upendra Baxi, Usha Ramanathan, Deepak Mehta and Ujjwal
Kumar Singh for having provided me with important materials and constructive
ideas on how to read the writ of habeas corpus. This paper was presented at the
Critical Legal Studies Conference, NALSAR, University of Law, Hyderabad, 2nd
September 2006, and thereafter a briefer version of this paper has been published in
the Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2006, 25:59–78. I thank the anonymous referees
for their useful comments.
1
HABEAS CORPUS

illustrates how narratives of love are entangled in procedural law,

how sovereignty is defined in relation to love and how love labours
in the punitive corridors of law. The picture of heterosexual love
presented herein underscores how love is a contested category that
unfolds in the juridical field of force. The recent literature on the
right of women to choose marriage, if and when they want to, has
inaugurated feminist critiques of the techniques by which a range
of laws are used to criminalise love in plural legal contexts in South
Asia (see Welchman and Hossain 2005, Mody 2002).
While the criminalisation of love has found documentation2,
the use of the writ of habeas corpus in the realm of love needs
foregrounding since it allows us to highlight the nature of custodial
power over women by their natal families in alliance with state and
non-state bodies of law and governance.
In this working paper, I suggest that analyses of procedural legality
allow us to explore the relationship between state law and sexual
governance. The issue of sexual governance has been detailed in
the feminist critique of the enforcement of marriage in contexts of
violence and abuse, whereby familial and legal discourses congeal to
enforce reconciliation between a battered woman and her abusive
husband, in the terrible struggle to break the intimacy of violence
that marriage enforces. While marriages without love are enforced
through the technique of reconciliation, marriages premised on
heterosexual love (rather than other social arrangements) may be
forced to die, suffer or endure punishing afterlives in courts and
state-run institutions. Here, I am not going to turn to the many

2 We know that the laws of abduction in late nineteenth century Canada, for instance,

were used by parents to punish a daughter and her boyfriend for marrying against
their wishes. Dubinsky (1993) suggests that the English laws on abduction which
were applied in Canada in the 1840s expanded the criminalisation of the abduction
of propertied daughters to include all women under the age of 16. She argues that
the prosecutions against consenting adults were scripted around those ‘improper’
alliances between Canadian women and ‘foreigners’ from East or South Europe.
2
 P ratiksha B a x i

painful instances where consensual marriages forged on the basis of

love have resulted in extra judicial killing, in what has now come to
be named as ‘honour killings’. Rather, I wish to look at how state
law is used as a resource to ‘recover’ an adult runaway daughter.
The socio-legal discourse on the recovery of women who forge
‘improper’ alliances is most clearly explicated by the use of habeas
corpus petitions. By juxtaposing recovery with reconciliation, I wish
to highlight the contradictions within the Indian judiciary about
the right of a heterosexual adult woman to choose her partner in
marriage. I argue that the lower judiciary acts in complicity with
the family to ‘rescue’ adult women from ‘improper’ alliances, which
contradicts the juridical emphasis on enforcing marital relations
through the technique of reconciliation.The emphasis on upholding
the institution of marriage means that distinctions between arranged
marriages and marriages of choice must find challenge within the
judiciary. It is this tension between the discourses of ‘recovery’ and
‘reconciliation’ that is explored in this paper.
In order to understand, how different laws are deployed to
criminalise marriages of choice, I must digress briefly to outline the
picture of legality and illegality that the letter and practice of Indian
law proffers. In Indian law, a woman attains the right to choose a
partner in marriage at the age of 18, when she is recognised as a
major. Even though the laws on kidnapping and statutory rape address
the underage female subject, these laws are concerned primarily
with securing the rights of the guardian over the underage female
subject. The realm of control over the sexuality of the underage
female is clearly gendered for the age of consent for girls is 16,
and there are no such legal standards set for boys. There is a further
distinction between married and unmarried minors, for a married
female minor is not allowed to withhold consent to sexual relations
within marriage when she turns 15, despite the law, which prohibits
women from marrying until they are legal adults at the age of 18.The
law on statutory rape of married female minors by their husbands
is anchored in the colonial legal history on the prevention of child 3
HABEAS CORPUS

marriage, and continues to be viewed as deterring child marriage

rather than entailing the protection of married minors from sexual
abuse in marriage. While young girls are taught to desire marriage
at an early age, they may be severely punished if they engage in
relationships of choice when underage. Furthermore, there are no
exceptions in the laws on abduction and kidnapping that allow a
minor to opt out of guardianship or to leave their home on grounds
of domestic abuse and neglect. These are adult hetero-normative
discourses. Thereby, it is important to examine how the law uses
adult categories to constitute girls’ and female children’s experience
of violence, and how it denies them an active agency.
In this paper, however, I look at how adult heterosexual women
who choose to get married in contravention to the wishes of their
families are brought under the fold of criminal and constitutional law.
I argue against that picture of black letter law, which suggests that
marriages of choice contracted by adult women are not criminalized
since the law permits an adult woman to make a choice in marriage. I
contend that this picture of rule of law elides how illegality resides in
the heart of state law (see Foucault 1977). Illegality is operationalised
through criminal complaints which forge the age of an adult daughter
to present her as a minor or claim a prior marriage to suggest
bigamy. A criminal complaint against the partner of the daughter
charging him with statutory rape, abduction and/or kidnapping is
a stabilised legal strategy to ‘recover’ a daughter who enters into an
‘improper’ alliance. This may be accompanied with a habeas corpus
petition that claims that the daughter is held in private detention.
The resourcefulness with which the laws on rape, abduction and
kidnapping are deployed by the natal family in consultation with
lawyers and police, then follows a rather efficient police procedure.
The police hunt the couple down. After finding the couple, they are
brought to the police station for questioning.
If the woman states that she was not abducted or raped, she may
face custodial violence, which is normalised under the category of
4 police remand. If she is able to withstand the pressure and violence to
 P ratiksha B a x i

break off her relationship, she may be jailed on grounds of a criminal

complaint brought against her usually on grounds of having stolen
some valuables from her parents’ home before she eloped. Or she may
be detained in a state-run institution for women. Detention in state
institutions of consenting adults follows a stabilised legal strategy.3
The woman must bear the burden of proving that she was not raped,
abducted or kidnapped. She must now prove to the court that she
is a consenting subject in a situation when she cannot appeal for
resources for legal representation from her natal family who initiate
the proceedings against her, and all the resources for the legal dispute
over her must flow from her affinal family who bear the costs of
legal representation for their son and his wife.
How do courts then ascertain choice and what are the procedures
that are instituted to set the stage of the judicial recognition of choice?
Who evokes the writ of habeas corpus and to what end? First, the

3 While this paper is confined to marriages of choice, recent work on the use of
criminal law and the writ of habeas corpus to control lesbian love remains critical to
further our understanding of how state law is deployed to control women’s sexuality.
In a stunning paper, Arasu and Thangarajah (2006), show how the laws of abduction
and kidnapping have been used against adult queer women in India.They document
how criminal law has been deployed against ‘runaway’ lesbian couples, which results
in charges of abduction against one of the women.While in some cases, the couples
have been successfully separated whereby Judges have prescribed medical treatment
as a ‘cure’ to lesbian love, in other cases charges of abduction do not succeed since
use of force is not established. In habeas corpus cases, the court in some cases has
ordered the woman, whose custody is contested by her parents, to live in a women’s
shelter. In other cases, Magistrates have ruled that if an adult woman chooses not
to live with her parents, then she cannot be held in detention by anyone. Unlike
heterosexual love, in such cases lesbian love remains a muted category, although
the dominant issue in the habeas corpus cases remains whether the adult woman is
held in illegal detention, underscoring thereby the status of the woman as an adult
rather than her sexual preferences. While recovery of daughters seems to be the
driving force of the criminal complaints of abduction, the argument that tests the
legality of detention seems to hinge on whether the woman is an adult.This reading
of queer sexuality in legal records allows us to understand how standardised legal
strategies used to control heterosexual love are also deployed to litigate lesbian love
in contexts where public disavowal of lesbian love is a norm. 5
HABEAS CORPUS

writ of habeas corpus has been used by adult women to challenge

their detention in state-run women’s shelters or protective homes for
women.When the fact that the woman is not underage and therefore
is capable of giving consent to marriage legally is established in
court, the stage is set to further establish that the woman is indeed
a consenting subject. Second, habeas corpus is used routinely by
parents to ‘recover’ adult daughters who run away and get married
against parental consent. Here, we find a contestation between social
constructions of adulthood and legal definitions of the rights of adults
to choice in marriage. If the daughter, now married to the man of
her choice, is produced before the court, she may be influenced, or
threatened, by her natal family depending to her response to familial
pressure to break off her marriage.Third, habeas corpus may be used
by the husband or his family, in the instance when the woman is being
detained by her natal family.This adjudication is often constructed as
a dispute over the custody of the woman between two parties i.e., her
natal family in dispute with her affinal family. Fourth, when couples
file a writ petition under different constitutional provisions seeking
protection from potential arrest and detention.Writ jurisdiction then
comes to detail contestation over the legality of the detention of a
woman who is described by her family as a subject who has been
abducted for the purpose of illicit sex or forcible marriage, and by
the affinal family as a consenting subject.
The criminalization of marriages of choice in state law narrates
the techniques by which politics of honour is folded into state law.
Such privatization of state law co-exists with the suspension of legal
action against those bodies, in a plural legal context, that act to punish
transgressive subjects. This issue gains particular poignancy when
children or young people are the subjects of accusation of dishonour
brought to a community by extra-judicial bodies such as the caste
panchayat. For instance, caste panchayats in Haryana have meted out
various forms of sanctions against alliances between couples considered
to be ‘illicit’ violating norms of fictive kinship, village exogamy and
6 caste norms (see Chowdhry 2004).There is other evidence to show
 P ratiksha B a x i

that young girls are also subjected to sanctions on the grounds of

suspicions of having consented to ‘illicit’ sexual relationships. Apart
from forcing the family or community of the accused couple to pay
fines and go through rituals of public humiliation or social boycott,
a couple may be forced to leave their home and in the worse case,
killed. Such abject subjects are constituted as being beyond the
circuits of power that routinely bind subjects to state law. This is
most clearly articulated in the jurisprudence of habeas corpus that
I wish to explore herein. I have mostly selected cases that concern
adult women heard before Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh,
a state in North India that has witnessed widespread extra judicial
killings of consenting adults who marry against existing norms of
alliance and the extensive use of state law in the attempt to enforce
these codes (see AALI 2004).

Habeas Corpus: Colonial Legacies

Usually standard legal textbooks narrate the histories of habeas corpus

from 1950, when the Constitution of India granted the Supreme
Court (SC) and the High Courts (HC) powers to issue the writ of
habeas corpus4 under Articles 32 and 226.These textbooks emphasize
that during the Emergency, the writ of habeas corpus was denied to
people who were detained under the extraordinary powers of the
state. Prior to 1978, the meaning of personal liberty was ‘restricted’
since ‘principles of natural justice or procedural due process’ were

4 There are many types of writs of habeas corpus. For instance, habeas corpus ad
presequendum is a ‘writ issued by a court, when it is necessary to bring before the
issuing court, for trial, a person who is confined for some other offence’ (Bakshi
2003:179). Habeas corpus ad subjuciendum is a ‘writ directed to the person detaining
another in his custody and commanding him to produce, before the issuing court,
the person so detained. This is the most common form of the writ. Its object is to
test the legality of the detention of a person and to secure his release if the detention
is found illegal’ (Bakshi 2003:179).
7
HABEAS CORPUS

not imported into ‘the words ‘procedures established by the law’’

(Massey 2005:344). This underwent an alteration with Maneka
Gandhi v. Union of India,5 which redefined personal liberty as well
as ‘imported the element of fairness and justness in the “procedure
established by law” depriving a person of his liberty.Therefore, now
a writ of habeas corpus would lie if the law which deprives a person
of his liberty is not fair, just and equitable.... After the amendment of
the constitution in 1978, the right to personal liberty under Article
21 cannot be suspended even during an Emergency, therefore the
writ of habeas corpus will even be available to people against any
wrongful detention during Emergency proclaimed under Article
352 of the Constitution’ (Massey 2005: 344).
This judgment marked a significant shift in underscoring the
importance of procedural legality in situations of state and private
detention.The legal meaning of emergency thus found new meanings
within which the rights of detunes were safeguarded. However, it
is curious that the circumstances that besieged those women and
children classified as abducted in the aftermath of the Partition
remain out of the framework of narrating how habeas corpus came to
animate the judicial discussion on the constitutionality of detention
in camps in the aftermath of the Partition. In order to re-visit the
debates on the remedy of habeas corpus in the aftermath of the
Partition, I first digress to the discussion on colonial law to look at
how habeas corpus comes to occupy a place in the jurisprudence
of choice marriages, and how legal subjects named as abductors use
this remedy.
How did the use of habeas corpus in cases of choice marriages
then stabilise as a legal strategy? In raising this question, I cannot
promise a thorough historical analysis, however I do wish to read
the literature available to us, to suggest that we need to see how
colonial legalities inflect the present through the stabilisation of the

5 (1987) 1 SCC 248

8
 P ratiksha B a x i

use of specific legal strategies in the domestic realm. It is commonly

known that habeas corpus was first introduced in British India in
1773, with the establishment of a Supreme Court in Calcutta. Clark
and McCoy note that:

In 1861, legislation was passed to create a series of High Courts

with a prerogative jurisdiction. But despite some efforts to apply
the common law of habeas corpus to India, the writ was finally
introduced in statutory form through a series of Criminal Procedure
Acts in the nineteenth century. Initially the legislation confined
access to the remedy to European British subjects, but later it was
extended to all British subjects born in British India. The most
important of these was the Criminal Procedure Code 1898 [India],
section 491 of which permitted the courts to issue directions ‘in
the nature of habeas corpus’, though only for the High Courts of
Calcutta, Madras and Bombay and thus the remedy under section
491 was not available to those detained outside the limits of these
three court districts, nor could the courts issue a common-law form
of the wit outside the limits of the presidency towns. In 1923 the
Criminal amendment Act 1923 inserted a new section 491 A into
the 1898 CrPC which allowed the remedy to issue from all of the
High Courts in British India, thereby dramatically broadening the
availability of the section 491 remedy. The provision expressedly
excluded from its scope detentions under political or state legislation,
and since bail was available under another provision of the CrPC
Act 1898, bail could not be sought via section 491 unlike the
common law version of the writ in England.The remedy although
contained in the CrPC, applied to either public or private custody
(2000:21–22).

Hussain’s reading of the histories of habeas corpus in the colony

demands a refusal to submit to surprise at the obvious awkwardness at
finding the writ of liberty in regimes of conquest6. He argues that the

6 Clark and McCoy also note that ‘the protection of personal security is perhaps
the most important human right. If someone is in detention his or her ability to
9
HABEAS CORPUS

colonial history of the writ of habeas corpus must be seen as ‘a history

of increasing and ultimately complete legal institutionalization’,
which details ‘the disparate ways in which law posits legal subjects,
and extends and consolidates state power’ (2003: 69–70). He argues
that:

Whether in its origins as a facilitation of sovereign power or in its

subsequent and modern guise as a check on the executive, whether
used to intern or to free, habeas corpus is a mode of binding subjects
to the law and to its economies of power. Even in its wildest
application, the writ demands clarification not of the correctedness
or ‘justice’ of an imprisonment but only of its lawfulness (Hussain
2003:70).

This reading does not submit to the idea that early colonial law
allowed ‘some quantum increase in freedom’ for individuals since
the effects of habeas corpus functioned ‘in colonial India to ‘free’
people from either governmental or private confinement’ (2003:95).
Rather, the irregularities of the process through which habeas corpus
inscribed people ‘in a system of state power that has hardly altered
today’ were ‘fraught with the contestations within the spheres or
branches of the emerging state form’ (2003:95). The oscillation
between intervening to test the legality of detention and claiming
sovereign immunity from such judicial probes is evident through the
reports of cases of habeas corpus.
Taking the example of Calcutta and Madras Courts, Hussain
observes that ‘the court was even willing to use the writ to intervene
in family disputes’ (2003:85). He cites several cases from different
High Courts to make this point, while remarking that the ‘Madras

exercise all other human rights is severely restricted or virtually non–existent.... As

inspiring as the history of the writ has been, especially in late 17th Century England,
it would be wise to appreciate that the writ had a darker history—and it has not
always been an unimpeded march towards greater liberty’ (2000:3).
10
 P ratiksha B a x i

High Court agreed to issue the writ in some surprising circumstances’

(2003:85). One such surprising circumstance is found in The King v.
DeUrilla—a case published in 1814—where the Madras High Court
held that the ‘court will not, upon a habeas corpus compel a young
woman that is marriageable to go home with her father contrary to
her consent’ (2003:85). Hence, ‘the fact that the writ was petitioned
for and granted in such instances suggests that habeas corpus had
found a place in the social relations of early-nineteenth century
India’ (2003:85).
The suggestion here is that this legal strategy was stabilised in
routine cases of choice marriages in colonial India. Indeed, this
legal route allowed a legal subject named as an ‘abductor’ to file
a petition of habeas corpus claiming that he did not abduct the
woman concerned and she was a consenting subject. We may add
to Hussain’s readings of colonial law that this struggle to complete
legal institutionalisation and establishing supremacy of state law
over caste based or community based norms about kinship and
marriage in routine cases was to find complete articulation during
the Partition in 1947. This time it was through an understanding of
what constituted an ‘exception’, which called for the suspension of
the writ of habeas corpus so that notions of ‘national honour’ could
be instituted through law. Muslim women who had been ‘recovered’
and sent to camps were constituted as impure body populations who
had no claims to Indian citizenship, and no man or his family could
claim that these women had been unlawfully detained in the camps,
unlike under routine law.
Any overview of the writ then must take into account the
position of the legislators in the Constituent Assembly who passed
a bill to define who the abducted subject was in law, to appoint a
tribunal which would decide citizenship and to declare that the
law could not supersede the decisions of the Tribunal so appointed.
It is this state of emergency that was inscribed by the Constituent
Assembly Debates on December 15, 1949 with the enactment of
the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949. The 11
HABEAS CORPUS

Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act was passed by

the Constituent Assembly on 15 December 1949. The Act was in
existence for eight years until 1957 and it was not renewed thereafter
(Butalia 2000).The Constituent Assembly debates must be read along
with the constitutional challenge to the Abducted Persons (Recovery
and Restoration) Act passed subsequently, in the Supreme Court.
The official history of the law passed is best represented in the
words of the Supreme Court judgment which adjudicated the
constitutional validity of the Act. I quote the Supreme Court in
State of Punjab v. Ajaib Singh and Anr7 below to indicate the reasons
given for the legislation.

It is now a matter of history that serious riots of virulent intensity

broke out in India and Pakistan in the wake of the partition of August,
1947, India to Pakistan and of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to
India. There were heart-rending tales of abduction of women and
children on both sides of the border which the governments of the
two Dominions could not possibly ignore or overlook. As it was
not possible to deal with and control the situation by the ordinary
laws the governments had to devise ways and means to control
the evil. Accordingly there was a conference of the representatives
of the two Dominions at Lahore in December, 1947, and Special
Recovery Police Escorts and Social Workers began functioning
jointly in both the countries. Eventually on November 11, 1948, an
Inter-Dominion Agreement between India and Pakistan was arrived
at for the recovery of the abducted persons on both sides of the
border. To implement that agreement was promulgated on January
31, 1949, an Ordinance called the Recovery of Abducted Persons
Ordinance, 1949.This Ordinance was replaced by Act LXV of 1949
which came into force on December 28, 1949.The Act was to remain
in force up to October 31, 1951, but it was eventually extended by
a year. That the Act is a useful piece of beneficial legislation cannot
be denied, for up to February 29, 1952, 7,981 abducted persons

7 MANU/SC/0024/1952: AIR1953SC10, 1953CriLJ180, (1953)4SCR254

12
 P ratiksha B a x i

were recovered in Pakistan and 16,168 in India. This circumstance,

however, can have no bearing on the constitutionality of the Act
which will have to be judged on purely legal considerations’.8

It is noteworthy that the Supreme Court clarifies that the

‘efficiency’ of the legislation had no bearing on determining the
constitutionality of the Act. Before moving on to the purely legal
considerations, we must note that the need for legislative control of
‘evil’, which the Supreme Court refers to, was embedded in languages
of honour and purity in the Constituent Assembly debates.
Das (1995) argues that the languages of honour that were deployed
by the state and the family were divergent in the way they spoke
about women. In the family,‘there was a tacit consent to give different
interpretations to certain norms of affinity, so as to enable the order
of the family to absorb women who may have been sexually violated
but whose condition had not been publicly enunciated or made
visible. This was the realm of practical kinship—as Pierre Bourdieu
calls it—distinct from official kinship, which is always on display’
(Das 1995:65). However, for the new nation states the recovery of
abducted women and children was a matter of ‘national honour’. Das
(1995) maintains that the concern with national honour operated at
three levels.The new definitions of ‘civilized’ governments inscribed
women as reproductive and sexual beings who had to be ‘recovered’
from the other side, while constructing the nation state of Pakistan as
being ‘party to this loot’ in the words of Pandit Thankur Das Bhargava
(cited in Das 1995:71). Finally, the ‘presence of Muslim women to
their own families was seen as a threat to the purity of the Indian
nation, for two reasons: First, despite the rhetoric on barbarism of
men who abduct women, this ‘lapse’ by men was seen as temporary:
by returning abducted Muslim women, Hindu and Sikh men will
supposedly regain their purity. Second, the very presence of these

8 ibid at para 14
13
HABEAS CORPUS

women is seen as contributing to the ‘immorality’ in the country’

(Das 1995:70).
The crystallization of notions of national honour differed from
the family in as much as practical kinship allowed absorption of
‘abducted women within the normal structures of family and
marriage’ as long as breaches of norm relating to purity or honour
could be covered by veils of silence (Das 1995:64). By creating
a new legal category, ‘abducted person’, which brought women
squarely within the disciplinary power of the state, an alliance was
forged between social work as a profession and the state as parens
patriae, making official kinship norms of purity and honour much
more rigid by transforming them into the law of the state’ (Das
1995: 66).
The abducted subject was brought within the disciplinary power
of the state by suspending the right to challenge ‘recovery’ as illegal
detention. For, the Act ‘took away the freedom of women to make
their own choices’ since the abducted person came to be defined
then as ‘male child under the age of sixteen years or a female of
whatever age who is, immediately before the 1st day of March 1947,
was, a Muslim and who, on and after that day has become separated
from his or her family, and is found to be living with or under the
control of non-Muslim individual or family, and in the latter case
includes a child born to any such female after the said date’.Thereby,
divesting Muslim women of the choice to return to their original
families, contest the powers given to the police to decide who was
abducted and challenge the legality of detention at camps. Moreover,
the Act held that a camp meant ‘any place established, or deemed
to be established’ by the provincial government for ‘the reception
and detention of abducted persons’. While detailing the procedure
of hearing questions on whether the person detained in a camp is
abducted or not, allowed to leave the camp or not and whether such
person should be restored to her or his relatives, the Act specifies
the formation of a tribunal to hear such matters. However, it states
14 that ‘the detention of any abducted person in a camp in accordance
 P ratiksha B a x i

with the provisions of this Act shall be lawful and shall not be called
in question in any court’.
The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus meant that ‘the
recovered women themselves, although promised a free environment
and ‘liberty’ were, by the very terms of the Bill, divested of every single
right to legal recourse. The writ of habeas corpus was denied, their
marriages were considered illegal and their children illegitimate; they
could be pulled out of their homes on the strength of a policeman’s
opinion that they were abducted; they could be transported out of
the country without their consent; confined in camps against their
wishes; have virtually no possibility of any kind of appeal (bar the
compassion of the social worker or the generally unsympathetic
authority of the Tribunal); and, as adult women and citizens, be once
again exchanged between countries and by officials’ (Menon and
Bhasin 1998: 105–6).
The protests by three members of the Constituent Assembly
against this clause were discounted. Referring to the promise of
fundamental rights in the Indian Constitution to be in place a month
after the debates they ‘warned that the Supreme Court would not
countenance the denial of the writ of habeas corpus, and it was
the right of every Indian citizen—which they were—to choose to
remain in India; by law and by right they could not be deported
without their consent’ (Menon and Bhasin 1998:106). Unlike the
expectations of these three members, the SC did not find the Act
constitutionally invalid when the validity of the Act was tested after
a habeas corpus petition filed by a man by the name of Ajaib Singh
accused of abducting and wrongfully detained a 12 year old girl was
heard. The facts of the case are as follows:
On 17 February 1951 an army officer made a complaint that Ajaib
Singh had abducted three persons and had detained them in his house
in village Shersinghwalla. The recovery police of Ferozepore raided
his house on 22 June, 1951.They found a 12–year-old girl, Mussamat
Sardaran who they delivered in the custody of the officer who was in
charge of the Muslim Transit Camp at Ferozepore and later she was 15
HABEAS CORPUS

sent to the Recovered Muslim Women’s Camp in Jullundur City.The

subsequent enquiries resulted in a report submitted on 5 October
1951. The police officer who enquired into the matter found that
Ajaib Singh had abducted the minor during the ‘riots’ of 1947. On
5 November 1951 Ajaib Singh, who claimed to be her father, filed
a habeas corpus petition. The Punjab High Court pronounced an
interim order that the girl should not be removed from Jullundur
until the petition had been disposed. This case was enquired into
by two DSPs—one each from India and Pakistan. After hearing
the statements of the girl, her mother, and her father’s brother, they
came to the conclusion that she was indeed an abducted person and
should be sent back to Pakistan to be restored to her next of kin.
However, she could not be sent to Pakistan until the High Court
decided the appeal. The report was submitted on 17 November
1951.The matter was then put to the Tribunal, which comprised of
two Superintendents of Police one each from both countries. The
Tribunal pronounced its decision on the same day.The petition came
up for hearing on 26 November 1951.
While the matter was referred to a full bench since it raised
important constitutional matters, the following day ‘the learned
Judges made an order that the girl be released on bail on furnishing
security to the satisfaction of the Registrar in a sum of Rs. 5,000
with one surety. It is not clear from the record whether the security
was actually furnished’.9 The Punjab HC held that the Act was
‘contrary to the mandate of Article 22—a fundamental right that does
not permit the arrest and detention of a person for over 24 hours
before being produced before a Magistrate’ (Ramanathan 1999:97).
The matter went on appeal to the Supreme Court. In the Supreme
Court, the release was found to be lawful after the Solicitor General
admitted that the constitution of the Tribunal was improper under
Section 6 of the Act. However, the Solicitor General pleaded that

9 State of Punjab v. Ajaib Singh and Anr at para 7

16
 P ratiksha B a x i

the Supreme Court ‘pronounce upon the constitutional questions

raised in the case and decided by the High Court so that the Union
Government would be in a position to decide whether it would,
with or without modification, extend the life of the Act which is
due to expire at the end of the current month’.10 While the reasons
for the decision were given later, the Court heard the arguments to
hold that ‘in view of the urgency of the matter due to the impending
expiry of the Act, that our decision was that the Act did not offend
against the provisions of the Constitution’.11
From the judgment, we do not know what became of the girl
who was set at liberty. However, we learn that the Supreme Court, a
bench of five judges, upheld the Act on the grounds that ‘the taking
into custody of an abducted person is not an arrest at all’, thereby
placing ‘the provisions of the Recovery Act beyond the reach of
Article 22’ (Ramanathan 1999:98). The Court held that ‘physical
restraint put upon an abducted person in the process of recovering
and taking that person into custody without any allegation or
accusation of any actual or suspected or apprehended commission
by that person of any offence of a criminal or quasi-criminal nature’
did not amount to arrest and detention when that purpose was
delivered to the in charge of the nearest camp under the meaning
of Article 22[1] and [2].
The Abducted Persons Act, 1949 was extended to be in effect till
1957, eight years after the Partition. This judgment then points to
the manner in which one of the objections against the suspension
of habeas corpus during the constituent debates failed. By drawing
attention to how the suspension of habeas corpus in the immediate
aftermath of the Partition in the context of the ‘recovery’ of abducted
women, notions of ‘national honour’ located the camp located outside
judicial review or ordinary processes of appeal. The histories of the

10 State of Punjab v. Ajaib Singh and Anr at para 13

11 State of Punjab v. Ajaib Singh and Anr at para 13
17
HABEAS CORPUS

writ of habeas corpus then points our attention ‘to the extent that
habeas is a protection from state power, the situation of emergency
that allows for the suspension of that protection is deeply written into
the rule of law’ (Hussain 2003:95). Equally, when we read routine
use of law in relationship to extraordinary law, we encounter the
use of habeas corpus by a legal subject named as an abductor—Ajaib
Singh. Hussain’s reading of colonial law to regulate custody of women
(whether minor or major), in early nineteenth century India, indicates
how habeas corpus becomes a stabilized legal strategy to claim or
contest custody of women.
Hussain’s analysis of habeas corpus in colonial law then is
extremely important to flag since it directs our understanding of how
habeas corpus by offering definitions of personal liberty is equally
directed at bodies and conducts,‘where rights may be understood as
another resource that can be used to convince others how to behave’
in routine everyday cases (Hussain 2003:72). At the same time, the
writ of habeas corpus brings the woman in circuits of sovereign
power where her consent or choice must be staged in courtrooms as
the ‘manoeuvre in the field of govermentality, invoking, prescribing
and cancelling out new expectations of normative conduct on the
part of both governors and governed’ (Hussain 2003:85). It is to the
staging of women’s choice in courtrooms through the activity of the
habeas corpus in contemporary postcolonial settings that this paper
draws attention, while indicating that further research on the use
of the writ of habeas corpus to regulate women’s sexuality remains
critical to furthering our understanding of legal manoeuvres in the
field of govermentality today.

Habeas Corpus against Detention by the State:

The Case of the Legality of Detention in a
Protective Home for Women

One of the ways women’s right to choice in marriage has been

staged in courtrooms is through the evocation of the writ of habeas
18
 P ratiksha B a x i

corpus against illegal detention by the state in everyday contexts.The

forms of state detention are varied.Women may be illegally detained
in police stations, prisons, state-run women’s shelters, or state-run
asylums12. Detention may be temporary or may span to long periods
such as six months or more.When the woman refuses to go back to
her natal family, the police and Magistrates often consider state-run
institutions to be the only spaces where the woman can be ‘safe’ from
the struggle over custody between two ‘parties’—her natal family
and her affinal family. In other cases, we learn the woman is sent to
the shelter to be free of pressures brought upon her either by her
natal family or her affinal family; hence this space is constructed as
the ‘neutral’ space13 which allows a woman to know her mind. In
Chandrasinh K. Jadav v. State of Gujarat & Ors, for instance, we learn
that the woman was sent back to the nari gruh (women’s shelter)
despite the fact that she stated that she wanted to return to her
matrimonial home:

[B]y way of abundant caution ... to enable her to disabuse her mind, if
possibly under some threat or pressures she was not freely expressing
herself before the court and further to coolly ponder over her fate
embolden her and reassuredly (sic) telling us where she ultimately
intended to return!14

12 Pankaj Sharma and Sarika got married against her parent’s wishes. Pankaj, an
artificial jewellery maker, was not as well off as Sarika’s family. The inter-caste
alliance was opposed by Sarika’s brother who alleged that she was mentally unstable
and therefore, could not consent to marriage. On June 23, 2005, the Court ordered
that Pankaj and Sarika should be examined for 10 days at the Agra Mental Asylum.
The couple were in the Asylum for ten days till the certification from the doctor
could declare them of sound mind (see www.http//ndtv.com).
13 Although this space is constructed as a ‘neutral’ space, it is often a route to

influence the woman to break off her relationship or marriage, or the institution
itself may hold many dangers to her safety as the nature of such institutions curtails
a number of fundamental rights while increasing vulnerability to different kinds
of custodial violence.
14 Spl. Criminal Application No. 356 of 1996, 10–04–1996.
19
HABEAS CORPUS

State detention in women’s shelters has been challenged by

women in courts of law on the grounds of illegal detention. Gian
Devi, an eighteen year old woman, filed a petition for writ of habeas
corpus against her detention in a Nari Niketan in Sonepat on 28
February, 1974.15 Her father was opposed to her marriage and wanted
her to marry someone else. He brought criminal charges of abduction
and rape against her husband and claimed in court that his daughter
was already married to another man. The magistrate sent her to the
Nari Niketan. Gian filed a habeas corpus petition in the Punjab and
Haryana High Court, which failed on the grounds of jurisdiction
on 18 March 1974. She then moved the Delhi High Court. On 15
April 1974, the Delhi High Court dismissed the petition on the
grounds that she was a minor and continued to be so at the time of
detention. Subsequently, she petitioned the Supreme Court under
Article 32 of the Constitution for issue of a writ of habeas corpus
to enforce her fundamental rights.
After hearing the lawyers representing all the parties,16 the court
directed that Gian be presented before the court, whereupon she
testified that she did not want to be detained in the Nari Niketan
and wanted to live with her husband—denying her father’s allegation
that she was already married to someone else. The SC held that:

[W]hatever may be the date of birth of the petitioner17, the fact

remains that she is at present more than 18 years of age. As the
petitioner is sui generis no fetters can be placed upon her choice

15 Gian Devi v. The Superintendent, Nari Niketan, Delhi & Others (1976) 3 SCC
234
16 Initially the Superintendent of the Nari Niketan, the Judicial Magistrate (Sonepat)

and State of Haryana were impleaded in the petition. Later, at the behest of the
Supreme Court her father and the man he alleged she was married to were also
impleaded.
17 Both father and daughter gave different date of birth, with the father claiming

that she was two years younger than what she declared to be her age.
20
 P ratiksha B a x i

of the person with whom she is to stay nor can any restriction be
imposed regarding the place where she should stay. The court or
the relatives of the petitioner can also not substitute their opinion
or preference for that of the petitioner in such a manner. The fact
that the petitioner has been cited as a witness in a case is no valid
ground for her detention in Nari Niketan against her wishes. Since
the petitioner has stated unequivocally that she does not wish to stay
in Nari Niketan, her detention cannot be held to be in accordance
of law. 18

Gian was freed after seven months of detention.

We shall read this case along with another case heard three
years later in the Allahabad High Court. Here, we find that Kalyani
Chowdhury filed a petition in the Allahabad High Court stating that
she was illegally detained in a protective home for women (Mahila
Ashram, Moti Nagar) in Lucknow.19 On the intervening night of 21
and 22 December 1977, she was ‘admitted’ to the home following an
order issued by the Magistrate. The order followed after the dispute
arose between her father and her husband or as the judgment says
‘a dispute between two parties’20. Clearly here Kalyani’s wishes are
seen as irrelevant in what comes to be a battle for custody between
two parties. She is not constituted as a party whose consent is secured
or whose interests can be represented to the court except through
the voice of the father or the husband. The framing sentence of the
judgment itself is revelatory of the performative demands made on

18 (1976) 3 SCC 234 at 235

19 See Mrs Kalyani Chaudhari v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Others 1977 Indlaw 62.
The inhuman and degrading conditions in a protective home in Agra met challenge
in the Supreme Court for nearly twenty years after a public interest litigation was
filed in the Supreme Court [see Dr Upendra Baxi (1) v. State of UP & Anr (1983) 2
SCC 308; Dr. Upendra Baxi (II) v. State of UP (1986) 4 SCC 106). Also see public
interest litigation against a care home managed by the Welfare Department, State
Government in Vikram Deo Singh Tomar v. State of Bihar 1988 (Supp) SCC 734.
20 Mrs Kalyani Chaudhari v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Others 1977 Indlaw 62

21
HABEAS CORPUS

the consenting subject, for it says that ‘the petition has been filed by a
girl alleging herself to be Mrs Kalyani Chaudhury’.21 The allegation
of an adult woman insisting on the fact of marriage based on choice
and volition must meet exacting and discretionary judicial standards
that establish her autonomy to choose.
When the Allahabad High Court (AHC) heard the case Kalyani
testified that she had married Vinod Kumar Chowdhary and wanted
to live with him. However, the authorities of the Mahila Ashram
did not permit her free movement and she was detained against her
will. This judgment is important since it clarifies that it is illegal to
detain a woman in a protective home when she does not attract the
provisions of the Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women and Girls
Act. The AHC held that the order of the Magistrate mentioned no
provision of law and suffered from an ‘inherent lack of jurisdiction’.
Thereby the detention was illegal.The AHC dismissed the arguments
made by her father’s lawyer by maintaining that the issue whether she
was a minor or a major was irrelevant since even a minor cannot be
detained against her will or at the will of her father in a protective
home. Kalyani was set at liberty after five days of illegal detention
since she had not committed any offence.
It is essential to point out that the Allahabad High Court notes
that there is no law that warrants Magistrates to send such women
to protective homes, which are meant only for women who are
detained or rescued under the Suppression of Immoral Traffic in
Women and Girls Act.This judgment is important since it allows us
to note how women caught in circuits of trafficking are conflated
with women who refuse to be exchanged in matrimonial trafficking,
to paraphrase Gayle Rubin (1975). However, we often come across
discussion on how women are sent to state-run home including
protective homes as if this was a ‘neutral’ space to make up their
minds without pressure.This form of illegal detention is anchored in

21 Mrs Kalyani Chaudhari v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Others 1977 Indlaw 62
22
 P ratiksha B a x i

discourses of recovery of women from improper alliances, and habeas

corpus then becomes a route to recover lost honour. The case law
then is anchored in socio-legal discourses of the rescue and recovery
of the woman named as abducted in law. Hence, how the consenting
subject is represented in law becomes critical to understand the way
choice is overwritten as coercion.
I wish to make two points here. First, we may argue that underlying
this judicial method is the assumption that women are easily manipulated
and do not know their minds.Their rationality and capacity to reason
as adults is seen as suspect until they satisfy judicial standards of who
is a consenting subject. The capacity to consent to a marriage of
choice thereby may entail having the strength to survive contexts of
incarceration and violence in state institutions.22 Second, we may argue
that while the courts may not hand over the daughter to the father
who contests his daughter’s desire to live with her lover or husband, the
court acts as parens patriae. In a sense, the sovereign power over an adult
daughter is folded into state law, thereby localizing state law.

Habeas corpus as a route to recover honour

If illegal detention in a state-run women’s home that follows criminal

charges, marks an alliance between legal and familial discourses of
recovering adult runaway daughters, the other technique of exercising
custodial power by the natal family is filing a petition of habeas corpus
as a route for recovering adult runaway daughters. A habeas corpus
petition becomes a route to recover a daughter, if the police do not
‘recover’ the missing woman.The habeas corpus case law is instructive
in highlighting the natal family as a space of private detention, and
underscores the need to look at the formative practices of violence
against women prior to their marriages by their natal family.

22Also see Payal Sharma alias Kamala Sharma v. Superintendent, Nari Niketan, Agra
and Others 2001(3) AWC 1778 (cited in Chakravarti above note 17).
23
HABEAS CORPUS

Even though habeas corpus has been traditionally understood

as a writ of right and not a matter of course, we find that there is
a certain routinisation of the use of the writ. For instance, Dwarka
Prasad filed a habeas corpus petition in the Rajasthan High Court
stating that his daughter Vedwati Kumari Sharma, aged 13 years old,
was missing since March 2001.23 He stated that Rajesh Sharma had
kidnapped his daughter under sections 363 (kidnapping) and 379
(grievous hurt) IPC. The police did not investigate this complaint.
The father of the abducted girl moved the court for tracing his
daughter and hence, the court monitored the investigation such that
the abducted girl was produced before the Court on 26 November
2001 within three days. The Deputy Registrar (Criminal) recorded
her statement.The statement revealed that Vedwanti was a major and
she had ‘eloped voluntarily’ with the accused.24 She was 19 when
she married Rajesh Sharma. She had given birth to a son who was
three months old when she gave her statement in the court. The
writ of habeas corpus was declared infructuous. The Court made
two observations that are pertinent to the discussion herein.
First, the Court emphasised that in habeas corpus petitions, it is
not the High Court’s place, to monitor police investigations as that
is the bounden duty of the police being the investigating agency
without any interference of law courts and the High Court is
certainly not meant to be treated as an executing court for enforcing
investigation of the cases which are registered by entertaining habeas
corpus.25
Second, the Court remarked that the State—as the respondent—
was at liberty to launch action against the father during the criminal
trial ‘as to why he had lodged a false report of abduction when his
daughter was a major and had left voluntarily with Rajesh Sharma’,

23 Dwarka Prasad v. State of Rajasthan and Ors 2002 Cri LJ 1278

24 2002 Cri LJ 1278 at 1279
25 2002 Cri LJ 1278 at 1279
24
 P ratiksha B a x i

if it were established that she was indeed an adult at the time. This
liberty was granted to the state in order to check ‘frivolous litigations
which is repeatedly brought before this court in the form of habeas
corpus’.26 The ire at the father-complainant for patently falsifying
the complaint is important to note since the Court suggests that
such frivolous litigation is routine in the Rajasthan High Court. By
and large cases, which are falsified by the parents, are not tried on
grounds of perjury or contempt of court. Police officials, magistrates
and prosecutors do not usually perceive the father as a subject of
perjury since the understanding of elopement as a crime against
the father is often a shared discourse—and therefore, ‘voluntary
elopement’ becomes a marked category in legal discourse.Voluntary
elopement is the counterpart to forced rape, a socio-legal category in
Indian legal discourse that seeks to determine the meaning of rape
in legal discourse in India.
What happens then when a father refuses to produce his daughter
after a habeas corpus petition filed by her husband?27 The case in
concern involved a Muslim father, a practising lawyer whose daughter
married a Hindu man and converted to Hinduism. Typically, the
father pressed criminal charges against his daughter’s husband and
recovered her. Her husband claimed that she was being illegally
detained by her father. One of the questions that arose here is whether
the accused-husband could file a writ of habeas corpus to secure
the release of his wife, while he faces charges of having abducted
and raped her? In October 1963, the Supreme Court (SC) held that
such a petition was highly unusual. I quote:

The writ of habeas corpus issues not only for release from detention
by the State but also for release from private detention. At Common

26 2002 Cri LJ 1278 at 1279

27See Mohd Ikram Hussain v. The State of UP and Others AIR 1964 SC (1625). Also
see Smt Suneeta through her husband Tulsi v. State of UP & Others 2003 (1) JIC 1027
(All).
25
HABEAS CORPUS

Law a writ of habeas corpus was available to the husband for

regaining the custody of his wife if she was wrongfully detained by
anyone from him without her consent. What amounts to wrongful
detention of the wife is, of course, a question for the Court to decide
in each case and different circumstances may exist either entitling
or disentitling a husband to this remedy.... Exigence of the writ at
the instance of a husband is very rare in English Law, and in India
the writ of habeas corpus is probably never used by a husband to
regain his wife.28

The SC held that the remedy provided under section 100 of the
Criminal Procedure Code allowed husbands to take action when the
detention was an offence, and the civil suit of restitution of conjugal
rights could be evoked when the detention was not an offence.The
SC further explained that:

In both these remedies all the issues of fact can be tried and the writ
of habeas corpus is probably not demanded in similar cases if issues
of fact have first to be established.This is because the writ of habeas
corpus is festinum remedium and the power can only be exercised
in a clear case. It is of course singularly inappropriate in cases where
the petitioner is himself charged with a criminal offence in respect
of the very person for whose custody he demands the writ.
A writ of habeas corpus at the instance of a man to obtain
possession of a woman alleged to be his wife does not issue as a
matter of course. Though a writ of right, it is not a writ of course
especially when a man seeks the assistance of the Court to regain the
custody of a woman. Before a Court accedes to this request it must
satisfy itself at least prima facie that the person claiming the writ
is in fact the husband and further whether valid marriage between
him and the woman could at all have taken place.... It is wrong to
think that in habeas corpus proceedings the court is prohibited from
ordering an inquiry into a fact.29

28 at para 97
29 at page 98
26
 P ratiksha B a x i

The Supreme Court then clarifies that the petition of habeas

corpus filed by the accused-husband must be preceded by an enquiry
into the facts of the validity of the marriage.
The other issue before the court was whether the Court’s sentence
against the father was justified when he failed to produce his daughter
in court despite court’s orders. Upholding the contempt sentence,
the SC held that the father seemed to have ‘overreached’ himself in
‘saving his daughter’ from her husband. The father was willing to
go to jail rather than allow the marriage to survive. By the time the
SC heard the appeal, the husband eventually ‘compromised’ the case
with his wife’s father. He had abandoned his wife and child, and did
not pursue the habeas corpus proceedings he had originally filed.
The criminal prosecution against him was dropped. In cases, such
as this one, the woman’s relationship with her husband or his family
may not be able to withstand violence, criminal prosecution, and
detention.This case allows us an insight into the way criminal law is
used to separate a man and a woman in a marriage of choice.The case
illustrates how a father prefers going to jail to regain control over the
daughter; thereby a prison sentence is seen as accruing lesser stigma
than relinquishing control over the daughter’s marital destiny.

‘Pro-Love’ Legal Strategies: The production

of the beloved’s body

State law is also used to counter the criminalisation of choice. In

cases where the couple manages to go in hiding or move the courts
to counter the criminal prosecution, we encounter a bewildering
number of petitions and counter-petitions filed in different courts by
both the parties.The appeals to state law range from petitions to quash
the FIR (First Information Report), challenges to illegal detention
and plea for personal liberty under the writ of habeas corpus, and
filing collusive suits for the restitution of conjugal rights. Appellate
judgments in India tell us that typically after the couple marries, the
husband may file a case of restitution of conjugal rights against his 27
HABEAS CORPUS

wife. The collusive case of restitution of conjugal rights is aimed to

gain legal recognition of the fact that the woman was not abducted
nor was she forced into marriage.This sets the stage for the woman’s
consent to be certified.The performance of women’s agency in court
is grounded in the anticipation of police action i.e., fear of arrest,
illegal detention and custodial violence. Courts of appeal have been
fairly responsive to women when such petitions are filed.30
The legal strategies adopted by ‘pro-love’ lawyers suggest that
this sub-specialisation of law has grown in response to the growing
demand for legal representation by consenting adults who wish to
prevent arrest or illegal detention and seek protection from the state
against familial violence.These legal strategies are used in marriages
of choice across caste or community31. In Oroos Fatima alias Nisha
and another v. Senior Superintendent of Police, Aligarh and another32 we
find the Court’s appreciation of fatherly restraint in a case where
a Hindu woman converts and marries a Muslim man. The facts of
the case are as follows:
On 5 May 1992, Mr. Jagdish Prasad Jain informed the police
that his daughter, Nisha Jain had disappeared. Five days later, he
filed a FIR stating that he had learnt since that Sabeeh Haider, who
was assisted by his brother Aslam, had taken his daughter away. He
also stated that the money his daughter had in her possession—a
sum of over ten thousand rupees—and her papers (such as school
certificates and degrees) were missing. He expressed his fear that his
daughter’s life was in danger. Oroos Fatima alias Nisha (petitioner
1) and Sabeeh Haider filed a criminal miscellaneous writ petition
in the Allahabad High Court under Articles 21 and 226 of the
Constitution of India seeking protection from arrest and detention.
They petitioned the Court to quash the FIR and subsequent

30 See Chakravarti op cit note 17

31 See Chakravarti op cit note 17
32 1993 Cri LJ 1
28
 P ratiksha B a x i

investigation filed in the Civil Lines police station in Aligarh to

investigate the crimes of kidnapping and abduction as defined under
sections 363/366 IPC.
Sabeeh Haider and Oroos Fatima told the court that they refuted
the claims made in the FIR.They told the court that they had married
each other of their choice. They met in college as students in the
computer-training institute at Aligarh.They fell in love and decided
to marry. On 12 January 1992 when they married, Oroos was twenty-
three years old. The copy of the nikahnamma was attached to the
petition. Subsequently the couple moved to Delhi. The judgment
details the subsequent action taken by the couple:

In paras 7 to 14 of the writ petition it was stated that the petitioner

No 1 withdrew from the society of her husband, petitioner No
2 and hence a suit for restitution of conjugal rights was filed at
Delhi which ended in compromise and the husband and wife
again started living as husband and wife. In the subsequent paras
it is stated that the informant Sri Jagdish Prasad Jain became very
much annoyed with the petitioners and lodged a false FIR which
is sought to be quashed in the present writ petition (1993 Cri LJ
1 at para 2).

I wish to make two points here very briefly before moving on

to describing what happened next. First, the petition does not use
the language of honour rather the category of annoyance (at the
daughter for marrying a Muslim man, and converting to Islam
against his wishes) is the framing device for situating the motive
for a false complaint. Second, the reference to the restitution of
conjugal rights litigation whereby Oroos Fatima ‘withdrew from
the society of her husband’ was filed in anticipation of the criminal
trial when the couple moved to Delhi. The Judge observed that ‘I
am not expressing any opinion regarding the allegations of marriage
of the two petitioners and its legality. However, in my opinion the
suit for restitution of conjugal rights was apparently a collusive suit,
but once again I am not expressing any final opinion about the 29
HABEAS CORPUS

same’.33 The judgment by offering us a probable explanation of the

collusive suit is careful in not casting aspersions on the legality of
the marriage yet offers a framework to understand the stabilisation
of legal strategies in the face of criminal charges brought about by
the woman’s parents.
What happened in court then when the petition came up for
hearing in the court on 11 June 1992? When the opposing counsel,
pleaded for time to prepare his opposition, the Court ruled that the
petitioners could not be arrested on the charges of kidnapping and
abduction for one month. Subsequently, the Court heard the petition
on 17 June 1992. We learn from the judgment that Oroos Fatima
appeared in court with her husband. Her parents were also present in
court. The Court made an oral direction that Oroos Fatima should
sit in the room of the Court officers, so that the father and other
relatives could ‘talk to her at leisure throughout the day.This was done.
At 4 p.m., the case was again called out.The father of the petitioner
No. 1 stated that he had enough opportunity to have conversation
with his daughter and felt satisfied. However, I [the Judge] gave
another opportunity to the parents to talk to their daughter and try
to convince her.The case was again taken up on 18–6–92 and again
the petitioner No. 1 and her parents were allowed to talk among
themselves at leisure. The case was called out after lunch’.34
The Court makes space available to Oroos Fatima and her family
members to allow repeated conversations so that her parents could
‘convince’ her at leisure. The failure of the negotiation marked the
limits of judicial rectitude when the case was called out after lunch
accommodating the hearing solicitously through the typically busy
workload of courts. Subsequently, Oroos Fatima’s statement was
recorded in court in the presence of her husband and her parents.
Oroos Fatima alias Nisha Jain stated that she was twenty-three years

33 1993 Cri LJ 1 at 3
34 1993 Cri LJ 1 at 2
30
 P ratiksha B a x i

old when married Sabeeh Haider on 12 January 1992. She stated that
Haider had not deceived her. ‘She expressed her desire to go to and
live with her husband and she has further stated that she was living
with him out of her own free will’.35 Commenting on the FIR,
the Court held that ‘it was but natural’ for her father ‘to apprehend
that the life of her daughter might be in danger’.36 The Court was
appreciative of the fact that Oroos Fatima’s father showed ‘restraint
in his FIR by not making any wild or untrue allegations’.37
This appreciation of fatherly restraint is noteworthy. It suggests
that the High Court is aware that a father under such circumstances
could make wild and untrue allegations. Moreover, it absolves the
father of false prosecution or untrue allegations on the grounds
that he apprehended danger to his daughter’s life. Even though the
father’s petition is dismissed on legal grounds, he is not pictured as
blameworthy. While the father is not found blamed, the police are
held responsible for illegally detaining women who leave their natal
home to marry against their family’s wishes.The Judge observed that
Oroos Fatima had:

[F]iled the present writ petition seeking protection from arrest and
detention and in my opinion her apprehension of detention are well
founded and she has locus standi to file the present writ petition.
Our experience tells us that when young females leave their parental
roofs the police out of sheer sympathy towards the parents or for
other reasons forcibly detain such women even if they are major and
have taken a decision of their own the police coaxes and sometimes
coerces them to make a statement suited to the prosecution.38

35 1993 Cri LJ 1 at 2
36 1993 Cri LJ 1 at 3
37 Since, the daughter’s statement established that she was a major who left her parents

home of her own choice and hence the charge of abduction and kidnapping under
Sections 366 and 363 were not valid. Oroos Fatima’s statement had shown that there was
no deception and ‘she was living there out of her own free will’ (1993 Cri LJ 1 at 3).
38 1993 Cri LJ 1 at 3
31
HABEAS CORPUS

This judicial experience is grounded in awareness of local practices

of policing whereby the police acting in concert with the family or
in an advisory capacity to the family break the law by detaining adult
women and fabricating criminal cases against both the woman and
her partner.39 Thereby, the ‘abducted’ woman who is ostensibly the
‘victim’ is often named as the accused or an abettor. It is significant
that the Court felt it necessary to spell out that Oroos Fatima was
not an accused but as the ‘alleged victim’, she could not be ‘arrested
or detained even if an offence was committed’.40 The Court is clear
that an ‘alleged victim’ of a crime of abduction and kidnapping
could not be treated as an accused, yet the practice of law divulges
that the production of an ‘alleged victim’ sets in motion a series of
illegal processes to produce a legal subject coerced to name herself a
victim of abduction. Hence, this face of custodial violence at the site
of the police station, which marks the alliance between the policing
practices of the family and the state remain central to our exposition
of the normalisation of the politics of honour by state law.
This judgment is important since it recognises that adult women
are illegally detained by the police and coerced through the threat
and/or actualisation of criminal charges, incarceration, violence and
humiliation to name themselves as victims of abduction.The Court
quashed the FIR and held that the police would not arrest any of
the petitioners in connection with the above crime. The Court
held that:

Even a temporary illegal detention is violative of the fundamental

rights guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. Coercion
of any kind is an antidote to the concept of the personal liberty.
Blackstone’s commentary on the laws of England 1 134, describes

39 The Court cites a division bench judgment, in almost similar circumstances, to

uphold its judgment. See Pratibha Singh v. State of UP, Civil Miscellaneous Writ
petition No 7708 of 1991, decided on 1–5–91.
40 1993 Cri LJ 1 at 3
32
 P ratiksha B a x i

personal liberty as including ‘the power of locomotion of changing

situation or removing person to whatever place one’s inclination
may direct without imprisonment or restraint unless by due course
of law’. I respectfully agree with the notions of personal liberty
mentioned above. The word coercion in modern times cannot be
construed in a narrow sense. It includes psychological restraints,
psychological restraints are much more deterrent than physical
restraints. They include all fear complexes of external origin and
can be described as infringements of personal liberty. The fear of
detention by police dilutes the concept of personal liberty and very
attribute of living with human dignity.41

By focussing on the different forms of coercion during illegal

detention, the judgment shifts the focus to practices of policing
that suggest their investment in the use of law in enforcing codes of
kinship and alliance in the context of intercommunity marriages.
The judicial address here is to the way policing is embedded in the
local in constituting a public, which is invested with affect rather
than legal rationality.
In restoring the legal rights of adults to marry a partner of their
choice, the Courts have also been mindful of the fact that even
though inter-caste or inter-faith marriages may be considered to be
‘immoral’ by society, these are not illegal. 42 In yet another case where
a Hindu woman married a Muslim man and converted to Islam to
marry him, the Court held that ‘efforts should be (made) to preserve
the marriage rather than destroy the same’.43 In this case, the Court
observed that if the woman were to be married elsewhere and then
it were to be known that she was previously married two lives would
be ruined. Furthermore, if she were sent back to her parents she

41 1993 Cri LJ 1 at 3
42 Payal Sharma alias Kamala Sharma v. Superintendent, Nari Niketan, Agra and Others
2001(3) AWC 1778 (cited in Chakravarti above note 17).
43 Mohd Kallo alias Mohd Jubeel v. State and Others, Writ Petition No. 979 (MIB) of

1999 (cited in Chakravarti above note 17 at 324).

33
HABEAS CORPUS

would be killed. The separation of law and morality calls for testing
the legality of detention rather than enforce detention in order to
uphold notions of male honour. Hence, courts have recognised that
restoring daughters back to the custody of their fathers may be akin
to signing their death warrants.
While similar legal strategies may be adopted in inter-caste
marriages or inter-faith marriages, my reading of recent appellate
judgments suggests that Hindu-Muslim marriages of choice are
haunted by the spectre of communal violence. For instance, a case
decided in December 2005 in the Allahabad High Court, details
how a Hindu boy married a Muslim girl creating a ‘furore in the
local communities’, which the Court points out is ‘of course nothing
unusual, in the prevailing social scenario. In cases such as these,
the Law Enforcement Authorities usually buy peace at the cost of
constitutional rights and privileges of citizens of this country.44 The
AHC directs the police not to ‘interfere with the matrimonial life of
the petitioners and to provide them adequate protection to them, as
and when necessary’45. It is suggested here then the police use the
trope of maintaining communal peace to break up Hindu-Muslim
marriages.The threat of the communal riot is then used as a resource.
The practices of policing are embedded in the way these publics
are constituted and the survival of a marriage of choice is seen as a
threat to public tranquillity.

The Abject Body: Beyond Habeas Corpus

The pernicious effects of the constitution of local publics, which

inscribe violence on women’s bodies in the context of inter-faith
or inter-caste marriages of choice, have been widely discussed by

44 Smt Pooja Arya & Anr v. State of UP & Ors 2006 (1) ALJ 424 (DB) at 424. Writ
Petition filed under Article 21, Constitution of India, right to life. The judgment
was pronounced on 1–12–2005.
45 Smt Pooja Arya & Anr v. State of UP & Ors 2006 (1) ALJ 424 (DB) at 424
34
 P ratiksha B a x i

feminists who have critiqued such local economies of punishment

in India. Existing feminist work on the production of killable bodies
through the decrees of non-state bodies such as caste panchayats, has
remarked on the immunity of such bodies from state law. The fact
that state law is suspended or it is ‘diluted’ to produce weak criminal
cases against the perpetrators has been seen as an acceptance of
the idea that consenting adults are ‘killable subjects’ in plural legal
contexts. In the discussion that follows, I present a precarious account
of how women’s bodies are made abject in plural legal contexts.This
account aims to de-stablise the picture of habeas corpus presented
so far. This disturbing picture of how the abject body is discursively
produced in court records is available to us through third party
litigation on grounds of public interest. The discursive production
of the abject body in the judgment cited herein accompanies the
pronouncement that certain legal subjects cannot be bound to state
law through habeas corpus.
I turn to Miss M.S.Annaporani v. State of UP46 to illustrate the legal
rendition of the spectacle of violence that was enacted against a young
Hindu widow in rural Uttar Pradesh for marrying a Muslim man.This
case came before the Allahabad High Court when the court received
a letter from the Registrar, Supreme Court of India.The letter arose
from the habeas corpus writ filed under Article 32, Constitution of
India, by an advocate M. S. Annaporani who was aggrieved by the
news reported in a local newspaper by the name of Hitavada on 30
July 1989. The newspaper report cited in the judgment detailed the
violence suffered by a 30 year old woman named Santaraji Debi, who
was gang raped and paraded in a Sourana village near Gorakhpur
(Uttar Pradesh), after she married a Muslim man47. The facts of the
case as gleaned from the judgment are as follows:

46 1993 Cri LJ 487

47 While the police may use the argument that Hindu-Muslim marriages of choice
lead to communal tension or communal riots in order to break up such a marriage,
this iconography is not used when a woman is subjected to gang rape and terrible 35
HABEAS CORPUS

Santaraji was widowed for six years when she met Ali Raza. She
met him after gaining employment in the government’s Angan Bari
scheme—a program for women that runs rural crèches and pre-
school informal education centres in every village. Prior to getting
a job, she was on the verge of destitution surviving on the sixty
eight rupees pension after her husband’s death with six children
to support. She began to earn two hundred and fifty rupees when
she started working with the Angan Bari. Ali Raza, employed in
the adult education programme, and Santaraji met in 1988. They
started living together from middle May 1998. They married in the
registry office. At first, no one commented on this alliance. Matters
got contentious when the Gram Pradhan—Paras Nath Yadav, who
according to the newspaper report, ‘had courted Santaraji’s favour
but without any success’—objected to this marriage and ‘swore he
would teach them a lesson’.48 What happened next is best described
in the words of the court:

In the afternoon of June, Yadav barged into their house. In the

fracas that ensued Raza was beaten up by the headman’s Hindu
supporters. The police arrived and removed the three protagonists
to the Camporganj police station about 15 kms away. Raza was
remanded to custody but Santaraji and Parasnath were released,
contravening standard procedure which requires all persons

forms of sexual humiliation in the view of village publics. This judgment allows
us to trace how the police interpret the violence endured as an act of punishment
for a transgression rather than a communal riot. The latter is steeped in a specific
iconography of the riot, anchored in an understanding of communal violence as
reciprocal violence between communities by anonymous crowds leading to death,
injury and destruction of property. It may be noteworthy to mention that rape as an
offence is rarely prosecuted during communal riots cases and in this case the sexual
violence against a single woman by an identifiable mob of men is not framed as a
communal riot. We may recall here that those Hindu women who chose to marry
Muslim men featured on the death lists prepared during the surveys of killable
subjects during the Gujarat 2002 violence (See IIJ Report 2003).
48 1993 Cri LJ 487 at 488
36
 P ratiksha B a x i

immediately connected with a case to be taken in for questioning.

Worse the woman was handed over to the villagers, to be used as
they saw fit.
And then began the abominable outrage. Santaraji was taken to
the house of one Badri Kiwat, one of the dadas (toughs) of Rampur.
At nightfall they entered her room. She was repeatedly raped till
early hours. Everyone seemed to be waiting to have his fill.At dawn,
after satiating half a dozen men, she made desperate bid to escape.
But she could then hardly walk and was predictably captured and
punished for her temerity.
A grand carnival of sexual insult was arranged. One Bijlee Singh,
assistant pradhan and Parsanath’s right hand man, and Phool Singh,
another heavy weight, were placed in charge of special effects.They
cropped her hair, garlanded her with a neck-lace of shoes. Painted
half her face with black ink and half with lime, stripped her, smeared
her body with red paint, sat her on an ass and paraded her four
hours through every lane in the locality. The bizarre procession
featured amateur music makers heralding the principal exhibit with
drums and trumphets. The Pradhan’s Bullet motor cycle, symbol
of power in the outback, brought up the rear. At any given time,
atleast hundred people were involved in the proceedings. Santaraji
was stoned and beaten with lathis all along the 50 km route. She
often fell off the ass, only to suffer the indignity of being hauled
back by the breasts. Finally she was thrown out of the village and
warned never to return.49

This case was reported to the local newspaper by a local

schoolteacher after ten days.
This chilling account has been cited here to indicate the manner
in which legal discourse discursively produces the abject body by
anchoring terror in normative categories of the carnival i.e., bizarre
processions, amateur music markers and participation of crowds in
the proceedings. The genealogy of the description of women being

49 1993 Cri LJ 487 at 489

37
HABEAS CORPUS

paraded has been stabilised in law and popular discourse in India

such that collective and organised violence is domesticated through
categories of ‘parades’, ‘proceedings’ or ‘processions’.
The anchoring of the violence in communitarian forms of
disciplining and punishing through processions of shaming in village
spaces may be traced to the evocation of the colonial law on offences
that evoke notions of divine displeasure. From the judgment, we
learn that the police registered a First Information Report (FIR)
against Paras Nath Yadav, Phool Singh Jethu, Ram Sevak and Rasul.
The accused were chargesheeted subsequently for offences under
s. 294 (obscene acts or songs), s. 342 (punishment for wrongful
confinement), s. 354 (assault or force with intent to outrage a woman’s
modesty), s 498 (enticing or taking away or detaining a married
woman with a criminal intent), s. 504 (intentional insult with intent
to provoke breach of peace), s. 508 (act caused by inducing a person
to believe that he will be rendered an object of divine displeasure)
and s. 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of
a woman).
The chargesheet is revelatory. Even though some of the men who
orchestrated this terrible violence were subsequently charged, they
were not charged on the ground of gang rape or rioting. Rather,
they were charged with breach of public peace, for outraging a
woman’s modesty and illegally detaining a married woman. The
most telling evocation is the application of section 508, IPC. Section
508 holds that:

Whoever voluntarily causes or attempts to cause any person to do

anything which that person is not legally bound to do, or to omit
to do anything which he is legally entitled to do, by inducing or
attempting to induce that person to believe that he or any person in
whom he is interested will be rendered by some act of the offender
an object of Divine displeasure if he does not do the thing which
it is the object of the offender to cause him to do, or if he does
the thing which is the object of the offender to cause him to omit,
38
 P ratiksha B a x i

shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a

term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or both (cited in
Ratanlal and Dhirajlal 2001:714).

The police by evoking this clause seemed to have charged the

accused for having acted against Santaraji to do that which she was
not legally bound to do, and by inducing Santaraji to believe that
she will be rendered by some act of the offender an object of divine
displeasure if she did not comply. In other words, the police interpret
this violence as a form of communitarian punishment that follows the
transgression of an inter-faith marriage, which derives its authority
from customs that source divine sanction.
It is startling how the police translates and authors the spectacle of
sexual violence as legitimate customary punishment.The evocation
of the colonial law on divine pleasure assumes a shared discourse
amongst the perpetrators, witnesses and the victim about what
constitutes custom and the divine sanction underlying custom. It
positions the woman as a complicit subject in these local economies
of power. The manner in which criminal law is translated here
produces an iconography of customary punishment, which is not only
based on a violent exclusion on the rights of the woman as a citizen
but also sanctifies this form of violence by naming it as custom.
We are told tersely that the matter reached the trial court whereby
the victim turned hostile to the case and her application seeking
permission to compound the offence was accepted50. We are told
that Santranji ‘specifically stated on oath that nobody had done
any insult to her nor had any offence been committed vis-a-vis

50 Section 354 and Section 509, IPC can be compounded, with the permission of
the court, by the woman against whom the criminal force has been used or who
has been insulted or whose privacy has been violated. Under section 342, which
defines wrongful restraint, the person restrained can compound the offence. Likewise,
section 498 allows the husband of the married woman who has been detained with
criminal intent to compound the offence since the offence is seen as being against
the husband rather than the woman.
39
HABEAS CORPUS

her person nor was she mal-treated’.51 On 27 September 1991 the

accused were acquitted. Dismissing the habeas corpus petition, the
court further held that:

It cannot be helped observing that from the judgment of the

Magistrate it is apparent that the helpless woman has helplessly
surrendered to the might of her adversaries.That alone might be the
reason why no evidence was forthcoming in such an outrageous case.
However, the type of evidence expected to come in such matters
may never be forthcoming if normal mode of the role of evidence
is followed.What alternative method of investigation or of recording
of evidence in order to bring the guilty to book shall have to be
taken requires immediate and serious deliberation by those who are
responsible for making and enforcing laws and maintaining order
in the society.
Painfully and with a heavy heart, this petition is dismissed but
with not too remote an optimism that necessity being the mother
of invention, an appropriate law-net will be thrown to catch
such rotten fish. After all, there is a silver lining to the blackest of
the clouds.52

We learn from the judgment that Santaraji’s marriage broke up.

We know nothing about how she was faring, whether she had any
resources to support her children or how she survived this violence.
Judicial inability to proceed without legislative changes to bring about
alteration in evidentiary law marked the closure of this case. The
evocation of criminal law here produces an iconography of customary
punishment, which is not only based on a violent exclusion on
the rights of the woman as a citizen but also sanctifies this form of
violence by naming it as custom. We may argue then that judicial
horror, at the appellate level, is displaced since it domesticates the
violence in custom as if this were the natural habitat of this form of

51 1993 Cri LJ 487 at 489

52 1993 Cri LJ 487 at 490
40
 P ratiksha B a x i

violence.The painful and heavy heart of the court then beats in the
patriarchal body of the law. It laments the patriarchy of customary
punishment. The object of judicial horror is the failure of state law
to preclude the formation of local publics that are embedded in the
rule of law. The evocation of habeas corpus, in this case, points to
those women who are made abject and not brought within such
circuits of power.

Diasporic legalities: Questions of Jurisdiction

I now turn to look at how manoeuvres of law and sovereignty

are fractured in different sites, in the contexts of immigration and
globalisation. To ask how spaces in Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani
cities and villages become the locus of incarceration of, and violence
against women of foreign nationality is to look at how law is implicated
in governing sexuality in transnational contexts.The complex ease by
which diasporic communities return to India in order to discipline
and punish errant daughters for desiring autonomy and choice in
marriage or sexuality is indicative of a distinct notion of diasporic
legalities. In this instance, diasporic legalities describe the plurality of
customs and laws that constitute formal and informal mechanisms
that govern women’s sexualities in transnational contexts.
Let us examine the judicial response to a situation when a woman
who married a man of her choice is persuaded to leave the country,
forcibly detained and killed in that country. Vasudha Dhagamwar
points out that a petition in the Supreme Court of India for a writ
of habeas corpus was given ‘very unsympathetic hearing’ on the
ground of jurisdiction (2002: 313). The facts of the case, as narrated
by Dhagamwar, are as follows:
In 1989, Farah Mohammed, a young Muslim student of Jawaharlal
University incurred the wrath and grave displeasure of her family by
marrying Abhiram Biswal, a Hindu. Biswal had taught her when she
was an undergraduate student at Rourkela, Orissa, where her father
was a highly placed civil servant. Under some pretext Farah’s family 41
HABEAS CORPUS

took her away to Karachi, in Pakistan. Her husband discovered her

whereabouts after a period of two months when she was allowed to
visit the British Council Library, and could smuggle out letters. In
her letters Farah begged her husband to rescue her or to bring an
instant acting poison for them both. Farah was kept a virtual prisoner
in the house of her mother’s sister. Her mother, who was a graduate
of a prestigious college in Calcutta, wrote to her sister ‘we would
much rather have her die than return to her husband’. Farah did die,
of 60 per cent burns. She was burnt in October 1989, soon after she
wrote to her husband, and died a lingering death in January 1990,
as per the communication from the Indian High Commission in
Pakistan. A criminal case of kidnapping against her father and other
relatives could only be filed after bringing extraordinary political
pressure on the police (2002:313).
The petition of habeas corpus did not succeed on two grounds.
First, the fact that Farah was taken out of the Court’s jurisdiction,
to Pakistan. Second, Farah had not been taken by force. Dhagamwar
points out that kidnapping, is not only an offence against a guardian
but also is offence when a person is taken outside of India ‘by force
or by fraud’ (2002:313). Hence, kidnapping in the IPC is also an
offence against the sovereignty of India. Dhagamwar adds,‘when the
unfortunate girl was reported to have died, even though there was
no verification, the learned judges were quick to dismiss the petition’
(2002:314).The dismissal of habeas corpus on grounds of jurisdiction
points to the operations of familial networks which escape from the
sovereign power to capture the body and bring it into law.
I now turn to the accompanying discourse of ‘rescue’ found in
diplomatic negotiation through law, which at times meets with the
routine evocation of procedural law in the form of habeas corpus
petitions. Let us consider reported case law in Pakistan, for example,
where habeas corpus becomes the route for rescuing a woman of
British nationality from the confines of a forced marriage. The
legal subject then carries a dual identity as a British national and
42 multicultural subject. Such petitions routed through the British
 P ratiksha B a x i

High Commission not only use routine and stabilised strategies

used to ‘rescue’ Pakistani women but also show us how procedural
law becomes a site where the contestations over diasporic legalities
are enacted.
To illustrate this argument, I turn to an instance of forced
marriage, illegal detention and violence against a British national in
Mirpur, Pakistan.53 This was an important case, as pointed out by
Hannana Siddiqui, a spokeswoman for Southall Black Sisters ‘because
it was one of the first occasions when a woman had spoken out
in a Pakistani court54’. Here, I detail the characterisation of forced
marriages as tantamount to illegal detention and the use of habeas
corpus petition as a legal strategy for producing a foreign national
held in a marriage under duress in court. In Cindy Parker v. Saeed
Saleem and 5 Others,55 we find that the British High Commission’s,
Second Secretary (Counsellor Section) Cindy Parker filed a writ
of habeas corpus under section 491 Cr.P.C. for the production of a

53 ‘The United Kingdom is home to about 600,000 Kashmiris, mostly from the
AJK’s southern Mirpur division. Forced marriages between British-born nationals
and their relatives in AJK are an issue of serious concern for the UK government
which has formed the community Liaison Unit at the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office to deal with these cases.The AJK and West Yorkshire police have also signed
an MoU for bilateral cooperation to deal with the issues confronting the Kashmiri
community and officials admit that forced marriages are dominant of such issues
(Forcibly married British-born girl freed from in laws’ custody’, 3 May 2003, DAWN,
http://www.dawn.com/2003/05/03/nat21.htm, accessed on 28–1–2006). ‘India
has protested to Britain over the appointment of an honorary consul in Mirpur,
pointing out to London that its office was located in what India calls Pakistan
Occupied Kashmir’.The spokesperson from the BHC explained that this was done
since ‘there are nearly 500,000 people from this area in UK. This appointment is
purely in response to a high demand for consular facilities’ (UK move on Mirpur
consul irks India, 16 December 2004, DAWN, http://www.dawn.com/2004/12/16/
top12.htm, 28–1–2006).
54 Zaffar Abbas and Jamie Wilson, British Woman in forced marriage freed, The

Guardian, May 8, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Pakistan/Story/0,2763,951204,00.

html, accessed on 28–1–2006.
55 PLD 2003 Azad J&K 34
43
HABEAS CORPUS

British national Neelum Aziz. This petition was supported with an

affidavit and a letter written by Neelum to the High Commission.
As a result of this petition, Neelum Aziz was produced in the court
of Chief Justice Syed Manzoor H. Gilani on 30 April 2003. It is
pertinent that the court followed similar procedures followed in
Indian courts before recording the woman’s statement. ‘Before
recording her statement, Neelum Aziz was given sufficient time to
sit along with a lady Advocate to be sure that she is free to make
a statement of her free will. After being satisfied that she is free of
influence of everybody, the Court recorded her above statement in
open court’.56 The statement has been reproduced in the judgment
recording that she was making the statement without any threat or
coercion. Her father brought her to Pakistan and she was ‘threatened,
beaten and forced’ by her father to marry Saeed Saleem, who was her
father’s sister’s son and mother’s brother’s son. She stated in court that
the she was forced and beaten into consenting to the marriage:

Actually I was not agreeing to the marriage ... I had tried 4 times to
go out of Pakistan and join my family in England but I was stopped,
beaten and threatened to be shot if I attempt to go again, or approach
the Embassy. I have tried to come to the Court but they stopped me
from coming to the Court.Today, I have been threatened to say that
I am happy; but I am not happy with Saeed Saleem ... I have been
detained at the residence at Kotli against my consent and I want
to go back to England to join my family. In case I am sent back to
my husband or uncles, they will kill me and I would never like to
go back with them.57

Neelum stated that she had told her husband that she did not want
to marry him prior to the marriage. He knew that she had written
to the British High Commission. Her answer to a question by Saeed

56 PLD 2003 Azad J&K 34 at 36

57 PLD 2003 Azad J&K 34 at 36
44
 P ratiksha B a x i

Saleem (indicating that the husband was allowed to question her) as

cited in judgment is revealing:‘I do not like him whether he likes me
or not’.58 Her husband Saeed told the court that ‘he had no objection
if she is sent back to her family in England’ and that he knew that she
did not want to marry him nor did she like him.59 He asserted that
the marriage was arranged by her father. Neelum was not allowed
to phone her family in UK, her identification—national insurance
card—was burnt and her visa had lapsed. She wanted to appeal to
her mother, two brothers, sisters and friends in UK. Her ornaments
were stolen by her husband and her uncles. Her father had returned
to England and was supportive of her uncles detaining her in Pakistan.
The Court found that Neelum had been ‘forcibly married to Saeed
Saleem’ and ‘illegally and improperly detained’60. She was set at
liberty with instructions to the SSP, Muzzaffarbad to provide security
and protection for a safe passage to the British High Commission at
Islamabad. The representative of the British High Commission and
the advocate representing Neelum were directed to lead the police
officers escorting Neelum to the High Commission.They were also
directed to ensure an air ticket and other arrangements for a safe
passage to England to ‘join her parents’.61 Moreover, it was held that
‘the court shall be informed by the High Commission about the safe
arrival of Mst. Neelum Aziz at her residence in England’.62
This judgment states that the detention of an adult woman
forced to marry and forced to live with the man without her choice
amounted to ‘improper and illegal detention of a person who is
major and entitled under law to reside and live at any place of his/
her choice.’63 Further, the Court held that:

58 Ibid
59 Ibid
60 Ibid
61 PLD 2003 Azad J&K 34 at 37
62 PLD 2003 Azad J&K 34 at 37
63 PLD 2003 Azad J&K 34 at 37
45
HABEAS CORPUS

The marriage of a girl does not make her living or residing with her
alleged husband legal or proper, if it is forced and she is compelled to
live.The marriage is a civil contract between the spouses solemnized
according to the social and religious rites of the parties with their
free or independent consent. Union has to remain free of coercion
and duress, not only at the time of marriage. This is Islam as well as
a common law/ principle. If one is forced to marriage or does not
feel convenient to live with spouse at the place where the husband
wants but wife feels insecure and threatened to live, it amounts to
illegal custody and detention, irrespective of validity or otherwise
of marriage.64

This judgment is a noteworthy illustration of how forcible

marriage comes to be characterised as illegal custody and forcible
residence with the husband characterised as illegal detention. It
demonstrates how common law is aligned with Islamic law to
regulate marriage as institution that cannot mimic the state by
appropriating legitimacy to detain and take custody of adult women.
The judgment highlights the importance of looking at forced
marriage as an act of detention, and brings the jurisprudence of
extraordinary laws to contest the way the diasporian subject—the
father—returns to the homeland. The return however haunts
the Court in terms of a safe passage under armed escort, while
it haunts us since Neelum returns to her family—but also to her
father. The judgment is singularly silent on the figure of the father
as the disaporian subject who uses the diasporic space to colonise
his daughter who asserted a British nationality into discourses of
fixed Pakistani origins.
How then does the disaporian subject translate a ‘homing desire’
into techniques of violence? This translation of male homing
desires folding women into discourses of fixed origins localised in
India or Pakistan is definitive of diasporic legalities. The nature and

64 PLD 2003 Azad J&K 34 at 37

46
 P ratiksha B a x i

limits of diasporic legalities leads us to the question of how does

the disaporian subject return? While ‘the homeland is one aspect
of diasporic imaginary’, Axel suggests that ‘rather than conceiving
of the homeland as something that creates the diaspora; it may be
more productive to consider the diaspora as something that creates
the homeland’ (2004:426). He argues further that ‘most commonly,
the ‘identity’ of a diaspora is understood to be impinged upon,
determined, demonized, or encompassed by the external force of a
nation-state. In other words, the diaspora and the nation-state are
seen to be isolable entities’ (2004:426). Contesting this picture of the
diaspora, Axel argues that the ‘diaspora and the modern nation-state
have become intertwined in a dialectical relationship’—a dialectic
that underscores ‘the fragile—yet enduring—ground of the nation
form itself, even as it animates the desires of diaspora to enter into
representation’ (2004:426).
This capacity of the nation form that finds animation from
the desires of the diaspora allows us to re-read Indian or Pakistani
appellate jurisprudence in relation to the form and nature of what I
label as diasporic legalities. I have used the term ‘diasporic legalities’
to label the way in which subjects living in diasporic spaces represent,
circumvent, recognise, adopt and deploy laws in a plurality of contexts,
and in legally plural environments.The intersection of personal laws
with English law termed as the angrezi shariat by some scholars or
evocations of culture in courts of law in Britain on the grounds of
cultural defence have recognised diasporic legalities. We also know
that the characterisation of ‘arranged marriages’, for instance, as
definitive of South Asian identities has marked the jurisprudence of
immigration in UK.The recent shifts in the discourse from arranged
marriage to moves to legislate against forced marriage mark the
tensions between multicultural and feminist concerns in UK.These
discursive shifts are exceedingly important to detail to understand
how technologies of surveillance, policing and punishment dispersed
in different locations traverse the borders and locality to constitute
the diaspora space. 47
HABEAS CORPUS

Conclusion

In this paper, I have suggested that the habeas corpus case law is
instructive in highlighting questions of citizenship in the domestic
realm and the constitution of the spaces of the family or the
community as a site of illegal detention and custodial violence.
In other words, it persuades us to look at the nature of custodial
power in the domestic realm, and how state law is privatised. I have
gestured towards the competing socio-legal discourses of recovery
and reconciliation which frame notions of male honour and the rule
of law respectively. I have suggested how law is used to ensure that the
intimate project of heterosexual love remains incomplete and how
law is used to prevent the terrible separation of love that parental or
community based sanctions seem to guarantee.The apparatus of state
law is used as a resource to destroy relationships based on love and
longing by producing a body devoid of autonomy to make a choice
in marriage. In contrast, the abject body, which cannot be produced
in court, on grounds of insufficient evidence in a criminal trial, points
our attention to the manoeuvres of law and sovereignty in different
sites, to show how habeas corpus fails when legal discourse excludes
women from claims to citizenship in the domestic realm. We may
suggest that in the contexts of immigration and globalization, the
histories of the writ of habeas corpus in the ‘post’—colony rather
than signifying the ‘production of a right, new or otherwise’ indicates
‘a maneuver in the production of a new configuration of law and
sovereignty’, and that the ‘legitimating project of procedural legality’,
is incomplete without an understanding of how legal regimes are
intrinsically entangled with genealogies of dispersion65.

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