A Hindu son can divorce his wife for the cruelty of trying to pry him away from his “pious obligation” to live with his aged parents and provide shelter to them, the Supreme Court has held.
A woman becomes a part of the husband’s family and cannot seek to separate him from his parents for the sole reason that she wants to entirely enjoy his income, a Bench of Justices Anil R. Dave and L. Nageshwara Rao observed in a judgment.
IT is a pious obligation of a son to maintain parents said the supreme court. Hence persistent effort of a wife to constrain her husband to be separated from his family constitutes an act of cruelty enabling him to get divorce, the court added.
The court said that for a wife insisting her husband live separately from his parents is a western thought” alien to our culture and ethos”
An Apex Court bench, having Justice AR Dave and Justice LN Rao, said that leveling false allegations against the husband — accusing him of extra-marital affairs and repeated threats to commit suicide — is also a ground for divorce.
“The persistent effort of the wife to constrain the appellant (husband) to be separated from the family would be torturous for the husband in our opinion,” the bench held, reversing Karnataka high court’s verdict that declined relief to the husband.
The Supreme Court said the trial court was right in arriving at a conclusion that the wife’s persistence constitutes an act of ‘cruelty’.
According to the Supreme Court, no husband would ever be comfortable with or tolerate a wife who constantly threatens to commit suicide. “….one can imagine how a poor husband would get entangled in the clutches of law, which would virtually ruin his sanity, peace of mind, career and probably his entire life.”
The apex court confirmed the divorce of karnataka based couple who got married in 1992.
