A Hindu-Muslim couple in Varanasi, both adults living together by choice, told the court their own families were the ones threatening them. The judge told police to step in if it happens again.
The Allahabad High Court has directed Uttar Pradesh police to protect a lesbian couple in Varanasi after the pair said their families were threatening to break up their live-in relationship. Justice Gautam Chowdhary, who heard the case, said the two women are free to live together without interference from relatives or anyone else.
The couple, who belong to different faiths, are both legal adults and told the court they are living together of their own free will. Their lawyer submitted certificates confirming both women's ages to establish that the relationship is between two consenting adults, not a matter for their families to intervene in. According to the petition, the threat came specifically from family members who objected to the relationship — not from any criminal complaint or third party.
The court's order is narrow but concrete: if the couple faces any obstruction to their relationship going forward, police are required to provide them with immediate security. That's a meaningful backstop in a country where interfaith and same-sex partnerships routinely draw family and community pressure, sometimes escalating to violence, with uneven protection from local police depending entirely on which station picks up the phone.
It's also a reminder of where things still stand nationally. India decriminalized same-sex relationships in 2018, but a 2023 Supreme Court ruling declined to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples, leaving couples like this one without the legal recognition that might otherwise settle a family dispute on its own. That gap is exactly why cases like this end up in front of a High Court judge rather than a courthouse clerk: a live-in couple has no marriage certificate to point to, so a protective order becomes the only tool available when a family won't back down. The state government's own counsel underlined the point during the hearing, telling the court there is no legal recognition of same-sex relationships in India — which is precisely why the couple needed a judge, not a statute, on their side.
High Court protection orders like this one don't change the law. They're a stopgap for two specific people, valid for as long as the threat persists, and they depend on a couple having the resources and knowledge to petition a court in the first place. But they're also one of the more consistent tools Indian courts have used to intervene in interfaith and same-sex live-in cases in recent years, and this order gives one more couple a legal document to hand a police officer who might otherwise wave them off.
Source: Rajesh Kumar Pandey, The Times of India
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