New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has ruled that a wife pressuring her husband to sever ties with his family amounts to cruelty, upholding a family court order dissolving the estranged couple’s marriage.
A bench of Justices Anil Kshetarpal and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar, in its September 16 verdict, observed that repeated public humiliation and verbal abuse of a partner constitutes 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,” the court noted.
The high court quashed the woman’s appeal against the family court’s order dissolving the marriage on grounds of cruelty. The bench highlighted that the wife consistently asserted she did not wish to live in a joint family setup and pressured her husband to partition family property and live separately from his widowed mother and divorced sister.
The court also cited repeated threats and filing of police complaints by the wife against her husband and his family as acts of cruelty. Denying the husband and his family emotional and physical access to their child was noted as a singular act of cruelty.
“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, adding that the husband’s claims were supported by consistent and corroborated testimony.
With PTI inputs