India, May 2 -- Stating that a child's welfare and not a foreign court's order is paramount, and citing the Ramayana story of Luv-Kush, the Madhya Pradesh High Court has refused to send a 10-year-old girl to Canada to join her father.

Dismissing a habeas corpus petition filed by the father, Justices Vijay Kumar Shukla and Binod Kumar Dwivedi of the Indore bench quoted the Sanskrit verse which says that mother and motherland are greater than heaven. The petitioner sought an order to send the girl to Canada and hand over her custody to him as per an order passed by the Family Court of the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario.

But the High Court, in the order passed on April 20, held that in matters related to custody, the paramount consid...