Supreme Court’s Euthanasia judgment shows dignity cannot be measured solely in heartbeats
There is a kind of grief that has no public language. It lives in hospital corridors at 2 am, in the steady beep of monitors, in the peculiar silence of a room where someone you love is present in body but absent in every meaningful sense. Most families carrying this grief have never heard of Article 21. They only know the question that haunts every morning: Is this still living, or have we confused the act of breathing with the fact of being alive? In January 2026, the parents of Harish Rana walked into the Supreme Court carrying that question in legal form. Their son had been in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) for 13 years, since a fall at 19 left him with irreversible brain damage. He breathed, and his eyes opened, but he had no awareness of himself or his surroundings and could not recognise the mother who had stayed beside him for 13 years. He was fed through a tube surgically inserted into his stomach. Two specialist boards, including one from AIIMS …
