Man hides past divorces, loses current plea in HC
The couple married in in Jan 2010 but it did not last more than six months.
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A child was born to them in Sept 2010. The couple have been living separately for nearly 15 years now. In 2019, the trial court granted the divorce, upholding the allegations of cruelty and desertion posed by the husband against the wife.
While the husband claimed to have disclosed that he was a divorcee, the wife claimed that he did not disclose his two divorces prior to marrying her. The husband claimed that the wife left him after six months of marriage and kept complaining to everyone, including his employer, which led to him being fired.
A part of his claim rested on the wife's purported neglect of household duties, her prioritisation of her legal profession as a practising advocate, and repeated threats to file false cases, which, according to him, resulted in a case under Section 498A of IPC.
The wife's version was that she was driven out of the house while she was pregnant, and when she tried re-entering after giving birth, she was not allowed. She claimed that the husband questioned her "moral character".
To support her claims, the wife submitted documents of the husband's two prior marriages and her approaching the protection officer in Howrah, showing her efforts to seek reconciliation and resume cohabitation.
She approached the High Court, stating that the trial court "egregiously erred by equating her legitimate pursuit of legal redress" with cruelty, without any proof of it being false or with malicious intent.
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On June 11, The division bench of Justice Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya and Justice Uday Kumar held: "We conclude that a divorce decree cannot be granted to a party (petitioner) who perpetrated foundational cruelty (eg, deliberate marital deception) of greater magnitude than any alleged misconduct by the other spouse, even if the marriage is irretrievably broken down, as it would constitute a miscarriage of justice and violate the principle of 'clean hands'.
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On the fact that the wife resorted to legal means for genuine grievance, the bench held that it cannot be automatically branded as "having committed cruelty" unless there is malicious intent shown.
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