Wife’s retaliation can’t be a ground for divorce

Recently, the Gujarat High Court has ruled that retaliation by tortured wife to acts of harassment can’t be considered as the amount to cruelty and the husband cannot be granted divorce on the said ground. It gives a relief to the married woman who was threatened with divorce by her husband. The bench of Chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya and Justice JB Pardiwala gave this verdict recently in the case of a couple who are in their late 60s and the husband wanted to divorce his wife after 30 years of marriage. The court refused to grant divorce to the petitioner husband.

The bench of acting Chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya and Justice JB Pardiwala ruled that even if it is believed that the woman had committed stray acts of cruelty in retaliation to harassment, this by itself does not constitute an act of cruelty so grave as to allow the husband to divorce his wife. If the woman feels helpless and is absolutely exhausted by daily trouble in the house, then at times, being a woman, she may retaliate. “However, this by itself will not constitute an act of cruelty so grave as to entitle the husband to the relief of divorce,” the Justices said.

“Even assuming for the moment that at times the respondent wife, in the heat of exasperation, may also have retaliated…this by itself is no ground to grant relief of divorce,” the bench said. The bench said, “But the acts of cruelty…must be more serious than ordinary wear and tear of marriage and should fall in the category of conscious acts cruel in nature, as that is the underlying requirement of the provision,”

The bench further said that cruelty may be accepted where the complaining spouse is able to establish that he was being treated with cruelty, physical, mental, social or otherwise.“There may be occasions where the conduct of wife may lead to unpleasantness but such unpleasantness alone will not amount to cruelty and this may reasonably fall within the ambit of ordinary wear and tear of matrimonial life which is not sufficient to establish cruelty as envisaged under the Act,” the court ruled.

According to one more case detail, the coupled were married in 1979, within three years of marriage; the man filed a petition for divorce in the family court. The husband had stated that his wife had walked out of the house on several occasions without a genuine reason and had returned very late in the night, and was in the habit of hurling utensils and tearing clothes. The husband had further alleged that his wife had assaulted him several times. The petition was not accepted.

Similarly, mere neglect, want of affection, or expression of hatred will not amount to cruelty. Further, the idiosyncrasies of wife cannot amount to cruelty even though they make the husband unhappy, the justices said.

Source: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-2652224161.html

If you need any further information or clarification in this regard, please feel free to contact us or post your queries on our website where one of our exclusively appointed legal experts will help you more: delhi-lawyers.in