The Jharkhand High Court has held that a husband's insistence that his wife accept his extramarital relationship and live with the other woman as a “younger sister” amounts to “mental cruelty of the gravest kind”, and dissolved the couple's marriage by granting the wife a decree of divorce, Live Law and Bar and Bench reported.
Source: Live Law
A Division Bench of Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Pradeep Kumar Srivastava allowed the wife's appeal against a November 2023 order of the Principal Judge, Family Court, Hazaribagh, which had dismissed her divorce petition filed under Section 13(1)(i-a) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. The case is F.A. No. 82 of 2024 (2026:JHHC:28726-DB), Verdictum reported.
Source: Verdictum
A marriage between two doctors
Both spouses are medical practitioners who married in February 2018 and lived in Dhanbad. The husband was posted at a Primary Health Centre in Tundi, while the wife was employed with Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL). The couple have lived separately since September 2019.
According to the wife's testimony, which the High Court accepted, the husband ill-treated her after the gauna ritual, subjected her to repeated physical assaults with household implements — causing a slip-disc and traumatic osteoarthritis — and continued an extramarital relationship even after a family intervention at which he had executed a written bond of assurance to end it. The husband denied the allegations, claimed the medical documents from her father's nursing home were fabricated, and had earlier obtained an ex parte decree for restitution of conjugal rights in January 2023.
“The respondent's insistence that the petitioner should accept such relationship and live with [the other woman] as a 'younger sister' amount to mental cruelty of the gravest kind.”
Why the family court was reversed
The Bench held that the Family Court had appreciated the evidence “in piece meal” and ignored the principle of preponderance of probabilities that applies in matrimonial cases, calling its finding perverse. It also ruled that medical documents cannot be discarded merely because they came from the wife's father's nursing home: “The settled principle is that the source of medical documentation does not ipso facto render it unreliable, unless specific infirmities are demonstrated.”
Source: Bar and Bench
Relying on the Supreme Court's decision in Samar Ghosh v. Jaya Ghosh (2007), the court held that the couple's prolonged separation since 2019 itself amounts to mental cruelty and shows the marriage has broken down beyond repair. “The respondent-husband's professed desire to continue cohabitation cannot override the appellant's right to live free from cruelty,” it said, observing that marriage rests on trust and, once that trust is broken, it is non-repairable.
Setting aside the Family Court's judgment, the High Court dissolved the marriage dated February 24, 2018 and gave the wife liberty to approach the Family Court for permanent alimony under Section 25 of the Hindu Marriage Act. Advocates Abhishek Thakur and Pratyush Navneet appeared for the wife, and advocate Soumitra Baroi for the husband.