BHOPAL: A 19-year-old married woman has received legal sanction to live “independently” with a man of her choice after she told Madhya Pradesh high court’s Gwalior bench that her husband – at 40, more than double her age – had been mistreating her and she didn’t want to return to her parents because they, too, didn’t wish her well.The April 2 order by a division bench of Justices Anand Pathak and Pushpendra Yadav came on a habeas corpus plea from the woman’s husband, who alleged that his wife was being held captive by a young man.The woman testified in the presence of her husband, parents and the man she was living with that the latter gave her the independence she craved and there was no question of returning to those who were “not my well-wishers”.Asked where she wished to live in future, the woman said she wanted to be with the person accused of keeping her in confinement.

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Govt advocate Anjali Gyanani, whom the court had deputed to counsel the woman in private, told the judges that she stuck to her stand of walking out of a marriage with a much older man after experiencing “discord rather than harmony”.The court also questioned the young man with whom she had moved in. He acknowledged his feelings for her, said he wished to marry her after her divorce and gave an undertaking that he would care for her and “not be a source of harassment to her in any manner”.The court’s order states that since the woman was an adult acting of her own volition, the habeas corpus petition had “outlived its purpose”. Before permitting her to live with a man other than her husband, the judges directed that the woman be placed under the state’s Shourya Didi framework for six months.Gyanani and a woman constable named Bhavna, who had produced the woman in court, were appointed as her Shourya Didis.The concept, evolved by the Gwalior bench in the 2024 case of Harchand Gurjar vs State of MP, envisages a female police officer or a fit person under the Juvenile Justice Act as a mentor and support figure for women and girls in vulnerable situations, particularly victims of sexual offences, girls in need of care and protection and children in conflict with law.