Rival pleas in divorce case can be decided together, says HC Swati Deshpande, TNN 15 November 2009, 02:29am IST MUMBAI: In a judgment that will aid speedy disposal in divorce disputes, Bombay high court has held that family courts have the power to jointly decide two different claims between warring couple. For instance, a husband’s plea to share the bed again and the wife’s request to stop sharing their lives can be decided at one go by the family court judge even though the two pleas may have been made two years apart. A two-judge bench of Chief Justice Swatanter Kumar and Justice Ajay Khanwilkar on Thursday upheld an order of the family court passed last June to club two different petitions — one by the husband and other by the wife — and to decide them together on merits to save ‘‘precious time and avoid more delay’’. In the matter before the division bench, a 48-year-old man had appealed against a single judge’s last November’s decision that had upheld a family court verdict. The man had filed for restitution of conjugal rights in 2004 before the family court in Bandra after a 15-year marriage. The wife took 10 months to oppose his plea and over two years later fired a salvo with her own petition seeking divorce on grounds of cruelty and desertion under the Hindu Marriage Act. The husband, citing the procedural rule book for civil cases, asked the family court to stay the wife’s petition and decide his demand first. He was confident that his plea would be granted and it would give them a year to work things out as husband and wife to ‘‘sustain the institution of marriage’’ which, he said, was the ‘‘primary objective’’ of family courts. The wife, instead said, the two pleas must be clubbed together otherwise it would only result in two separate trials. The court agreed that ‘‘precious time will be saved since the husband’s petition was pending for four years’’ and, to ‘‘avoid further delay and multiplicity of trials, it was in the interest of justice to decide both petitions together’’.
