Mumbai: In a significant ruling, the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court (HC) on Friday said that uploading a profile on a matrimonial portal, while the divorce proceedings of the first marriage is pending, would amount to cruelty. Based on this, the HC granted divorce to a man who proved that he was subjected to high degree of mental harassment by his estranged wife.
The bench, comprising Justices Atul Chandurkar and Govind Sanap, was hearing a plea filed by the husband, who works for the Goa bench of the High court. The man said that his wife was forcing him to leave his permanent job at the court and settle down in Akola where her parents lived. He claimed that after spending a few months there, he found that his wife was aggressive by nature and used to tell a lot of lies. He added that his wife had registered several fake complaints against him with the Panjim and Akola police.
However, his wife said that her husband’s family, especially his mother who is the assistant registrar at the Aurangabad bench of the high court, ill-treated her. She claimed that her in-laws harassed her for dowry and that she was forced to do household chores.
Meanwhile, during the course of hearing in the family court, the husband pointed out to his wife’s profile that was uploaded by her on two marriage websites, BharatMatrimony.com and Shaadi.com. He argued she wanted to leave him even before the court could pronounce its verdict.
The family court, however, did not grant a divorce but pronounced a judicial separation. Disagreeing with this, the bench led by Justice Chandurkar said, “On perusal of the matrimonial profile uploaded by the wife, it shows that even before a decision was taken in the divorce petition, she had made up her mind for the second marriage. On the basis of this, it can be inferred that she wanted to leave her husband.”
The bench also noted that the family court had observed that “cruelty is not of such a nature which would cause reasonable apprehension in the mind of the husband that it would be harmful or injurious for him to live with the wife”.
“In our opinion, if the family court had taken into consideration the documents produced on record before its judgment, whereby the wife had uploaded her marriage profile on two websites, it would not have recorded such a finding. This evidence clearly indicates that the wife had no wish and desire to remain in the company of her husband,” the bench said, adding, “If she had a sincere wish and desire to save her marriage, she would not have taken a conscious decision to perform the second marriage even before the final outcome of the divorce petition.”
“In our opinion, the husband on the basis of cogent and concrete evidence has made out the case that he was made to suffer mental cruelty of high degree and therefore, he took a conscious decision to get separated from his wife,” the bench ruled.
