New Delhi: The Allahabad high court has imposed a Rs 25 lakh penalty on a father who confined his two adult daughters, Zoya Diya Bhatia and Amina Anshu Bhatia, at home after they converted to Islam. The penalty is to be split between Anil Kumar Bhatia and the “delinquent” state authorities who colluded in their confinement at the father’s behest.As per the 22-page order, a bench of Justice Sandeep Jain held the womens’ confinement to be “wholly illegal and without any sanction of law”. It held that fundamental rights “cannot be eclipsed by parental authority, social morality or majoritarian sentiment”. “There can be no question of an adult major woman being kept in the ‘custody’ of anyone else against her wishes, desire and volition,” the order states.In July, the women’s counsel had approached the high court with a habeas corpus petition alleging that their father filed a police complaint in Agra in May 2025 to stop them from changing their religion and had illegally confined them. While one of the women is in her mid-thirties and worked as a lecturer, the younger woman is in her twenties.The petition stated that the women were physically restrained, intimidated and mentally harassed to renounce the faith they had voluntarily adopted. The court observed that the state government, instead of securing the release of the women, had permitted their illegal detention to continue “under the cover of the criminal proceedings”, reports Live Law.While hearing the petition, the court recorded on August 8 that their responses to queries regarding their decision to change their faith were “spontaneous, coherent and unequivocal”. The court noted that nothing indicated that either of them was acting under coercion, fear, inducement or undue influence.The court did not pass an order on the criminal cases registered against the Bhatia sisters, but it held that their conversion did not appear to run afoul of the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 or other sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) applied against them by Uttar Pradesh Police.The Hindu reports that the court described the case as an exceptionally grave violation of constitutional rights and said that the sisters were “free to reside at any place and with any person of their own choice, without any interference” from their father, any other person or the state and its functionaries.Anil Kumar Bhatia was ordered to return his daughters’ passports, educational certificates, identity documents, bank passbooks, cheque books, conversion-related documents and other original documents and belongings within seven days, reports the Hindu.The two sisters embraced Islam in 2020 and 2021, respectively, and faced an FIR under Section 87 and other provisions of the BNS that deal with compelling a women to move against her will as well as kidnapping, abduction or inducing her to compel her to marry against her will or forcing her into illicit sexual relations.During a previous hearing on the habeas corpus petition on July 31, the prosecution (state of Uttar Pradesh) argued that both conversions were part of a conspiracy that was being investigated and therefore the women should not be produced before the court on August 6, as directed by the court. The court held even if a conspiracy existed, that did not justify keeping the women under lock and key.“Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that the alleged conversion has not been effected strictly in accordance with the procedure contemplated under the Act of 2021, such an assumption, by itself, would not authorise the continued confinement of two adult women by their father against their wishes,” the judge observed, as per a report in LiveLaw.The court pointed out that the women’s detention could not follow from the alleged illegality of their religious conversion – both were separate issues.The state government also argued that their conversion was a threat to India’s integrity, sovereignty and security. The court held that no material had been placed before it to demonstrate that the women’s voluntary exercise of religious choice, by itself, constituted such a threat, reports LiveLaw.As per the Hindu, the court noted that the constitution does not give parents a “licence to incarcerate their major children merely because they disapprove of their faith, beliefs or personal choices”.“Constitutional rights cannot be eclipsed by parental authority, social morality or majoritarian sentiment. The liberty of an adult individual is inviolable, and any attempt to suppress that liberty by force or coercion invites the constitutional scrutiny of this court and attracts appropriate public law consequences, including the award of monetary compensation for the infringement of fundamental rights,” the judge reportedly noted.