SC redefines desertion in matrimonial disputes

New Delhi: The Supreme Court (SC) has ruled that a spouse merely living separately does not amount to desertion. The aggrieved other spouse must prove that the estrangement wasn’t due to ill-treatment meted out by him or her.

Under the Hindu Marriage Act, ‘desertion’ is one of the grounds for seeking divorce. SC had, in certain judgments, held that desertion amounts to cruelty.

Ravi Kumar of Orissa was granted divorce by a family court. His wife Julmi Devi went to the high court (HC), which overturned the family court’s order. Kumar then moved SC, re-seeking divorce.
Dismissing Kumar’s appeal, SC said the trial court ought to have examined whether Devi deserted him because of cruelty. The couple’s daughter had told HC that her father used to beat up her mother. She didn’t know the reasons for her father’s behaviour.
Devi told HC that she didn’t desert Kumar. He had made the situation so difficult that it became impossible to live with him, Devi said. Kumar neither accused Devi of cruelty nor did he harp on the desertion point.

A bench of justices P Sathasivam and Asok Kumar Ganguly agreed with HC saying, “The wife had sufficient ground to live separately. In this case, the evidence of the daughter is very crucial.”

The wife couldn’t be held guilty either of desertion, a term which hasn’t been defined in the marriage law, the judges said.
“Actually, such a definition is not possible,” the bench said.
“In matrimonial relationship, cruelty would obviously mean absence of mutual respect and understanding between the spouses which embitters the relationship and often leads to various outbursts of behaviour which can be termed cruelty,” the bench said.

“Cruelty in matrimonial behaviour defies any definition and its category can never be closed. Whether the husband is cruel to his wife or the wife is cruel to her husband has to be ascertained and judged by taking into account the entire facts and circumstances of the given case and not by any pre-determined rigid formula,” the apex court explained.

“Cruelty in matrimonial cases can be of infinite variety — it may be subtle or even brutal and may be by gestures and words. The categories of cruelty in matrimonial cases are never closed,” the judges observed.