TV
A wife pressurising her husband to sever ties with his family members amounts to cruelty, the Delhi High Court has said and upheld an order dissolving an estranged couple's marriage.
The high court further noted the repeated public humiliation and verbal abuse of a partner was mental cruelty.
"While the mere desire to live separately is not cruelty, persistent and pressurising conduct to sever the respondent's (husband) bonds with his family certainly is. The Supreme Court held that a wife's persistent effort to alienate a husband from his parents constitutes mental cruelty," a bench of Justices Anil Kshetarpal and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar's September 16 verdict said.
The decision of the high court, as a result, quashed the woman's appeal against a family court order dissolving the marriage of the estranged couple on the ground of cruelty.
The bench said the wife consistently asserted she did not wish to live in a joint family setup and pressured her husband to partition the family property and live separately from his widowed mother and divorced sister.
The most obvious act of cruelty, which would constitute a ground for divorce, was the repeated threat and filing of police complaints by the wife against her husband and his family members, it added.
The bench said the husband succeeded in establishing, through consistent and corroborated testimony, acts of cruelty attributable to the wife.
Denying the man and his family emotional and physical access to the couple's child constituted cruelty of a singular nature, the bench noted.
"The respondent successfully demonstrated a sustained pattern of pressure, humiliation, threats and alienation. Taken together, these acts go well beyond the 'ordinary wear and tear of married life' and constitute mental cruelty of such gravity that the respondent cannot reasonably be expected to endure them," the bench said.
PTI
