Why It Took India 13 Years to Let Harish Rana Go: Lessons For A Nation

The Harish Rana verdict is a landmark. What it reveals about us is far more important than what it decides.

Today, the Supreme Court of India gave a family permission to let their son die. The boy's name is Harish Rana. He was pursuing BTech at Panjab University. On 20th August 2013, he fell from the fourth floor of his PG accommodation and suffered severe brain damage. He slipped into a permanent vegetative state. The doctors said there was no coming back. Yet, for more than 12 years, he was kept alive using Clinically Assisted Nutrition and Hydration (CANH) via a PEG tube. The parents kept waiting for a system to tell them what to do next.

On Wednesday, a bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and KV Viswanathan finally did. They allowed Harish's parents to withdraw the medical treatment keeping their son alive — marking the first time in Indian legal history that a court has directly allowed passive euthanasia. India Today reported that Justice Pardiwala appeared emotional while delivering the verdict. Which tells you something about the weight of what this country has been avoiding.

There is a moment in the Mahabharata — one of the quieter ones, easily missed — where Bhishma lies on his bed of arrows on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. He is mortally wounded. He could die at any moment. But he doesn't. Because Bhishma had been granted a boon — the power to choose the moment of his own death. So he waits. He waits for the uttarayana, the auspicious northward journey of the sun, for a conscious, dignified exit.

Many believe death to be a foundational idea in Indian civilisation. Hinduism does not fear death — it engages with it. The most famous lines of the Bhagavad Gita are about the soul's continuity across death, the idea that what we mourn is a transition, not an ending. Buddhist philosophy, woven deep into Indian culture, is built almost entirely on the acceptance of impermanence — the idea that clinging, to life or anything else, is the root of suffering. Jainism has Sallekhana, which is a centuries-old practice of voluntarily fasting unto death, understood not as suicide but as an act of spiritual transcendence, a release from the cycle of suffering.

For millennia, India has been one of the most philosophically sophisticated civilisations on earth when it comes to mortality.

Yet, in 2026, a family had to travel all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to say goodbye.