Bhopal: The Indore High Court has established a precedent in the definition of mental cruelty in marital life. In a recent divorce case, a bench of Justice Vivek Rusia and Justice Gajendra Singh held that forcing a wife to drop her studies amounts to mental cruelty and can be a reason for divorce.
The court said that compelling a wife to drop her studies or making an atmosphere where she cannot study crushes her dreams at the outset of marital life. In addition, pressuring her to remain with an illiterate husband who is not ready to educate himself is tantamount to mental cruelty and is grounds for divorce.
This ruling comes merely a day after the Indore High Court ruled against the verdict of another family court in yet another case of divorce.
The case involved Bhuri, a native of Shajapur district, who wed a person named Bheem on May 1, 2015. While getting married, she was in the 12th grade and had aspirations for further studies. Her in-laws had been initially okay with it. But once the official Gauna ceremony on July 16, 2016, was over, she was brought to her husband’s residence with the promise that she would be back at her parents’ home in two days.
Contrary to this promise, her in-laws prevented her from continuing her education. Instead, they allegedly began harassing her over dowry, claiming that her family had provided ₹1 lakh less and had not gifted a motorcycle. Due to police intervention, Bhuri’s father brought her back home on July 27, 2016.
Later, Bhuri had also sought divorce through a petition filed in the court of Shajapur, to which her husband responded by making a plea to have the matrimonial relationship revived. The husband’s plea was rejected by the lower court on the grounds that there was no evidence against him that he had been cruel to his wife or indulged in unnatural acts. The court additionally noted that the wife had rejected him on unfounded grounds.
Bhuri then went on to appeal against this verdict in the High Court, and there were new disclosures. It was found that upon her return to her parents’ house, she had also graduated successfully. The High Court re-examined all the evidence, including even the statement by the husband in the court below about forbidding her studies, and went on to grant her divorce.
Discussing the problem of establishing mental cruelty in court cases, the High Court noted that whereas physical cruelty is easy to prove through evidence, mental cruelty tends to be more challenging to verify. But in this instance, the husband’s own statement was enough to establish that what he had done constituted mental cruelty.
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