The Dignity The Law Missed: Terminal Patients, Active Euthanasia And The Silence Of The Constitution
Siddhi Sharma, B.B.A. LL.B. (Hons.), GLAU, Mathura
ABSTRACT
This paper begins with a question that the law has not yet properly answered: what happens to a patient who is terminally ill, fully conscious, and in daily pain but has no machine to switch off? In March 2026, the Supreme Court of India permitted passive euthanasia for a real individual for the very first time. The judgment in Harish Rana v. Union of India was a watershed. But it also threw into sharp relief a gap that has existed in Indian constitutional law for decades, the complete absence of any legal protection for dying patients who fall outside the passive euthanasia framework. This paper examines that gap. It is not an argument for unrestricted legalisation of active euthanasia. It is an argument that the Constitution, which has always claimed to protect human dignity, cannot keep pretending that certain dying people simply do not exist.
I. INTRODUCTION
Some questions sound like they should have easy answers. If a person is dying knowingly, painfully, irreversibly and they ask for help ending their suffering, what does the law say? In India, as it currently stands, the answer depends almost entirely on whether a machine is involved. If there is a ventilator, a feeding tube, a device sustaining the patient's life, the law has a process. The family can approach a medical board. A court may intervene. The treatment can, under careful conditions, be withdrawn. The patient dies. The Constitution calls that dignity.
But take the machine away. Put the same patient in the same bed, with the same terminal diagnosis, the same clear mind, the same request except now there is no device keeping them alive. They are simply dying, slowly, on their own, in pain. What does the law say to them? Right now, it says nothing. There is no framework, no legal pathway, no constitutional conversation that speaks to this patient's situation. They exist in a gap so wide and so quietly maintained that most people who think about euthanasia in India do not even realise it is there.
