Posted on 01/19/2026 4:39:25 PM PST by Morgana
The Supreme Court of India now holds the fate of a single young man and, with him, the moral direction of the country. If the justices authorize the withdrawal of food and fluids from 31-year-old Harish Rana, they will not only decide how one life ends. They will create India’s first concrete case of court-sanctioned “passive euthanasia” under the Common Cause framework and set a precedent for every similarly vulnerable person who cannot speak in their own defense.
Common Cause is the 2018 judgment in which the Court read a “right to die with dignity” into Article 21 of the Constitution, accepted so-called “passive euthanasia,” and recognized advance directives or “living wills” under strict procedural rules. In practice, it built a legal pathway for doctors and families to withdraw life-sustaining treatment when they consider a patient beyond recovery.
Harish’s story is not theoretical. In 2013, he fell from the fourth floor of his apartment complex and suffered severe head injuries. Since then, he has lain in bed, completely dependent on others, and receives nutrition and hydration through feeding tubes.
He does not rely on a ventilator, but he simply relies on ordinary nursing care, human presence, and the simple act of feeding that every infant, every frail elder, and every disabled person needs when they cannot feed themselves.
But now, two medical boards, including a panel from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), describe his condition as irreversible and see no meaningful chance of recovery. On the strength of those opinions, his family has asked the Court for permission to withdraw nutrition and hydration under the passive euthanasia rules. They ask that Harish be moved to palliative care and that doctors administer sedatives after the tubes come out.
If the Court grants the request, Harish will not die from the fall that injured him thirteen years ago. He will die because someone decided to stop giving him food and water.
The Common Cause judgment tried to draw a clear line between killing and letting die. In the Court’s view, when doctors withdraw treatment underlying disease causes death, they do not intend the death but simply let nature take its course. On paper, this distinction looks neat and palpable. In Harish’s case, it collapses.
His injury no longer presents a crisis. If the feeding tubes come out and no one offers another way to nourish him, he will die from dehydration and starvation that others chose.
This misperception grows from the way the law treats nutrition and hydration as if they were just another medical intervention. A feeding tube may look technical, yet its purpose remains simple. It delivers food and drink. Once food and water turn into negotiable items, the distinction between allowing death and causing death loses its force in practice.
That distinction matters most for people with the least power.
If the Court approves the removal of his feeding tube because he shows no hope of improvement, it will send a quiet but brutal signal to millions of Indians who live with severe disabilities. It will say that their claim on the community’s care rises or falls with the level of independence they can show. It will say that when others decide a life no longer counts as “meaningful,” even the essentials that keep that life going may disappear.
A society that chooses this path tells many of its members that they live on probation and borrowed time.
Supporters of passive euthanasia speak in the language of mercy. They look at families like Harish’s and see fatigue, financial strain, and years of grief. We should see that too. Their suffering calls for our compassion and our practical help.
Yet real compassion never forgets the person who lies silent in the bed. It asks how we can support the caregivers, not how we can remove the one who needs care. It does not answer despair with a legal device that ends the patient’s life.
The Supreme Court of India understands the delicacy of its task. The justices have already said that they, too, are mortal and that they feel the weight of deciding life and death. That sense of limitation should push them toward restraint.
Harish cannot speak, but his continued existence pleads with the Court on behalf of many others like him. Children who will never walk or talk, adults who slip into dementia, accident victims who never fully wake up, all stand, in a moral sense, beside his bed. The decision in this case will tell them whether India sees them as burdens to manage or as neighbors to protect.
For their sake, and for the sake of the country’s own conscience, the Court should refuse to authorize the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration. India shows its true dignity when it stays beside those who cannot recover, feeds them, comforts them, and accompanies them to a natural death. Harish and those like him ask for nothing more and deserve nothing less.
LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.
I hate to think of how some Freepers will respond to this.
Will he be hungry when he’s reincarnated?
This case epitomizes the globalized western infectious, and erroneous, belief that judges hold some magical superior moral clarity over the people, and thus, magically, once they are appointed to high judicial positions, they can magically “correct” what the people did not mandate that their elected officials put in the law or actually in the constitutions.
The judiciaries of other nations who have been westernized watched in fascination as this moral trickery played out in the United Stats since Woodrow Wilson, and their judges have since sought to emulate it.
The grand height of this moral trickery was the creation of the so-called “International Criminal Court”.
I would agree with the family’s wishes. Allow Harish’s soul to move onto the next realm. His physical body no longer provides any quality of life appropriate for a 31 year old man. Simply existing does not necessarily equal ‘living’. That much is clear. This step is long overdue, has been postponed mainly to appease the needs and sentiments of the living.
Permit him to go home to God without further delay. There will always be a risk that this sort of decision making could be misused. All we can do is view each situation on a case by case basis.
The government gets to decide who lives and dies?
“The government gets to decide who lives and dies?”
Are you against or in favor of the death penalty?
In this case, it would be the government, with expressed support of his family.
I will always stay on the side of miracles still happen, in spite of all emotions someone might have.
I say fry them as expediently as possible. Before you say anything about it, I believe that euthanasia is the total opposite of an execution.
Probably the same as with Terri Schiavo, with disgust. Why is Jeb Bush never going to be President? /rhetorical
That is right. One of them involves the taking of an innocent human life (in this case by starvation and depriving them of water, in the case of abortion by tearing a baby limb from limb or chemically dissolving them alive), the other accomplishes punishment, the removal of evil from the society, and as a deterrent to others. There is no equivalence at all. If we condemn someone to death based on "the quality of their life", where do you draw the line?
‘ If we condemn someone to death based on “the quality of their life”, where do you draw the line?’
At the person’s right to their own decisions about their own life and death perhaps?
We condemn someone to death based on what they have done against his fellow human, not by "the quality of their life."
I would not want to judge the quality of a life of anyone. Does a so called brain dead person still have a soul? How could you or I know?
Some people (the unborn and some severely disabled like the man in the above story) are not capable of expressing their wishes. Are we to assume they want to die, especially by starvation/thirst or other barbaric means? It is their life, not ours.
Read with more focus please. This is wishes of his family, judge going along what family wants as gift from vapid painful life.
So, O.J. was right to kill Nicole?
So, the government do everything family members do? No they don’t, so the government is deciding. Why do you want to invest them with that power?
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