Our Correspondent / New Delhi
On the International Women Day Akhila Ashokan aka Hadiya got major reprieve from Supreme Court as her marriage is restored by the apex court today.
SC set aside Kerala High Court order. Her marriage with Shafin Jahan cannot be annulled. However, NIA may probe if it finds any evidence of trafficking, terrorism.
A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra and comprising Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud passed the interim order in the alleged Love Jihad case.
Earlier in January thi year Supreme Court allowed the National Investigating Agency (NIA) to probe all the aspects, except Hadiya’s marriage to Shafin Jahan.
“We can’t go into the marriage. Whether the person she is married to is good human being or a bad human” — the bench observed, noting that Hadiya is 24 years old and has made an independent decision and choice to marry.
Making it clear that the National Investigation Agency has to stay away from the marriage of Hadiya with Shafin Jahan, the court observed that the agency could probe into “all other aspects except her marriage”.
Hadiya was set-free and allowed to pursue her studies in the last hearing of the matter as she had told the court that she wanted to pursue her internship in the Sivaraj Homoeopathic College in Salem in Tamil Nadu.
The case concerns Hadiya’s conversion to Islam, and her subsequent marriage to a Muslim man Shafin Jahan. In a judgment rendered on 25 May last year, a Division Bench of Kerala High Court had called her marriage a “sham”, and had annulled it, directi…