India’s Supreme Court Widens Definition of ‘Family’
NEW DELHI — India’s Supreme Court has ruled that family benefits under the law must be extended to blended families, same-sex couples and other households the court considers “atypical,” widening its definition of family.
It is the latest in a series of court decisions to challenge the country’s conservative mores, and it could have major implications for the rights of women and gay people.
The court ruled in favor of Deepika Singh, a nurse whose employer, a government medical institute in northern India, had denied her application for maternity leave after she gave birth because she had already taken leave to care for her husband’s children from a previous marriage. “The concept of a ‘family’ both in the law and in society is that it consists of a single, unchanging unit with a mother and a father (who remain constant over time) and their children,” the two-judge bench said in the decision, which was made earlier this month and published this week. “This assumption ignores,” said D.Y.
Chandrachud, the justice who wrote the order, “the fact that many families do not conform to this expectation.” The justice wrote that “family” could be defined by various configurations of adults occupying the roles of primary caretakers with both biological and nonbiological children. “These manifestations of love and of families may not be typical, but they are as real as their traditional counterparts,” he wrote. “Such atypical manifestations of the family unit are equally deserving not only of protection under law, but also of the benefits available under social welfare legislation.” Akshay Verma, a lawyer who argued Ms.
