Claims of cruelty alone are not sufficient for granting divorce, says HC

MUMBAI: Refusing to grant a divorce to a 39-year-old man who alleged that his wife had an extra-marital affair and deserted him, the Bombay High Court said that the man had failed to produce evidence of ‘cruelty’ against him

MUMBAI: Refusing to grant a divorce to a 39-year-old man who alleged that his wife had an extra-marital affair and deserted him, the Bombay High Court said that the man had failed to produce evidence of ‘cruelty’ against him. It said that claims of cruelty alone are not sufficient for granting divorce. “Cruelty has to be proved by the party who alleges it by producing evidence,” a division bench of justices Bharati Dangre and Manjusha Deshpande said in a recent order.

In this case, the wife, 37, had failed to come before the court and the man claimed that she had deserted him and started living with another man. The judges said that the family court that had refused to grant him divorce was right in holding that “when such allegations are made against the character of a person, they are required to be proved by adducing evidence in support thereof”.

The judges concurred with the view of the family court that held that “no oral or documentary evidence is produced by the petitioner (husband) to show that the conduct of the respondent (wife) towards the petitioner amounted to ‘cruelty’.”

The husband had challenged the family court’s decision of dismissing his petition for divorce in 2023. The couple was married in 2013 in Uttar Pradesh and they lived in a joint family with the man’s parents in Andheri. In 2018, the man secured a job in the middle east and would visit his wife in Mumbai frequently. He said that in 2019, he also transferred ₹29.50 lakh to her personal account to pay a builder from whom they had purchased a flat in Mira Road. He alleged that while he was away, his wife “used to frequently go out without informing his mother and was behaving in an irresponsible and careless manner”. In 2021, he said, they filed a missing complaint at the Andheri police station after the woman disappeared without informing her family.

The husband alleged, the wife kept ₹12 lakh out of the funds transferred to her for her personal use, she had stopped living with the husband and moved in with another man and failed to come before the court despite notices. This, the husband’s lawyer said, was enough to show that she was not interested in living with the husband.

The judges, however, said that the husband’s claims were “self-contradictory”. They asked if the couple had separated in 2018, why had the husband sent the money to her account in 2019 when he could have paid the builder himself. In 2021, the judges asked,“What was the occasion for him to file a missing complaint against her if they had already been residing separately since 2018?”.

The judges agreed with the family court that said that “by making allegations against the character of the wife, the appellant (husband) has raised disputed questions of fact which need to be proved”. Even if the wife had not appeared in the court, “the burden was on the appellant to prove the ground of cruelty by producing convincing evidence to the satisfaction of the court, which the appellant has failed to do”, the judges said. .

Even if the wife was not before the court, the judges turned down the husband’s divorce plea stating that the court is bound to satisfy itself about the truthfulness of the grounds raised in the petition. “No facts can be deemed to be proved on account of the mere allegation in the plaint,” the judges said.