Living together is not a crime, whatever you have been told
Families and sometimes police talk about a couple living together as though it were an offence. The Supreme Court has said clearly that it is not — twice.
Two adults sharing a home is not illegal in India. It is treated as scandalous in a great many families and as a crime by nobody with the authority to say so, and the gap between those two facts is where a lot of frightened people live.
What the court said
In S. Khushboo v. Kanniammal, decided in 2010, the Supreme Court quashed a stack of criminal complaints and stated plainly that living together is not an offence, and that two consenting adults doing so are within their rights however unpopular that is. In Indra Sarma v. V.K.V. Sarma, in 2013, the court went further into what such a relationship means legally, setting out when one falls within the protection of the domestic violence law.
What that is worth when a family objects
Mostly it means a complaint filed against your partner has nothing under it. Families sometimes go to a police station expecting the fact of cohabitation itself to be actionable. It is not, and a station that treats it as such is wrong on the law rather than exercising a discretion.
What it does not do
- It does not make you married, and it does not create the rights a marriage creates.
- It does not stop a landlord refusing you, which is common and is a separate fight.
- It does not protect you from being reported missing by your own family — that is a different problem, and it has its own page here.
Worth knowing mostly because the accusation is so confidently made. It helps to be certain, in the moment, that the confident person is wrong.
Sources
- S. Khushboo v. Kanniammal, Supreme Court of India, 2010
- Indra Sarma v. V.K.V. Sarma, Supreme Court of India, 2013
This is where the people are
Reading is the easy half. Writing your own situation down — privately, visible to nobody until you say otherwise — is what puts you in reach of people who have already had the conversation you are dreading.
