Originally published in The Sunday Guardian on 5 apr '26
A landmark judgment rekindles questions about life, dignity, and the right to depart.
We have always known how to postpone death. We built hospitals and filled them with machines that can sustain biological function long after every meaningful possibility has receded; we extended lifespans, reduced infant mortality and pushed back the frontier of cardiac arrest and cancer and infectious disease.
We called this civilisational progress, a description that in many respects holds, but somewhere in the accumulation of all this capacity to keep the body alive, we forgot to ask a prior question: what, precisely, are we keeping alive, and for whose benefit are we keeping it alive? That question has remained politely unasked for a long time, carried in whispers through hospital corridors and never quite making it into honest public conversation, until a recent Supreme Court bench permitted, for the first time in India in practical terms, the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for a young man who had spent thirteen years in a persistent vegetative state following an accident, his body maintained by tubes and machines while every medical assessment confirmed that no meaningful recovery remained possible. His family described what they had watched across those years not as care but as prolonged agony.
The Court agreed that the right to live with dignity, enshrined in Article 21, could not be separated from the right to die with dignity; that artificially sustaining a body in permanent unconsciousness did not honour life but merely extended its biological shadow. More than collective approval, that ruling calls for the kind of honest examination this society has long found reasons to defer.
