Indu Bai Vs. Koutik

Court: Madhya Pradesh High Court

Bench: JUSTICE M.L. Malik

Indu Bai Vs. Koutik On 2 April 1981

Law Point:

Threat by Wife to commit suicide and nagging tendencies can tantamount to causing mental cruelty to the Husband.

JUDGEMENT

Respondent Koutik filed a petition for divorce against the appellant-wife in the Court of Additional District Judge, Burhanpur, on two grounds : (i) cruelty and (ii) desertion. The learned Additional District Judge has accepted the first ground and has passed a decree of divorce under Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act; hence this appeal.

2. The following facts are established from the appellant’s own testimony. Koutik and Indubai got married in April, 1962. The Gauna ceremony was performed 3 or 4 years after i.e. sometime in 1965 or 1966. The husband and wife lived together for only a year. Thereafter, Indubai left the marital home and lived with her parents. She was blessed with a son who should now be about 12 years old. Indubai did not return to her husband and a petition was filed by him for restitution of conjugal rights. That was in February, 1972. The Court brought about reconciliation and Indubai agreed to go back to her husband. The petition for restitution was rendered infructuous. Indubai went to live with Koutik. Hardly did they live together for 4 or 6 months when she left the husband again. She has not come back to husband since then. This petition for divorce came to be filed in November, 1976. On the day she left the husband’s home, a minor incident had taken place. She was ill-treating the child while giving him bath and the husband reprimanded her. After he left for work in the Mills, she packed off to go to her parents. But before going she picked up a brick and hit it hard on her head so that she should bleed and create an evidence of cruelty against the husband. The person who saw her hitting herself is Bhaulal (P.W. 2). The learned Additional District Judge has believed him since no independent evidence to the contrary has been given by the appellant. Her pleading in para 12 was that Koutik and his brother had beaten her and turned her out. Now from the witness-box, she says that Koutik had left for the Mill. It was in his absence that his brother had ill-treated her and had done the maar-peet and that she was turned out by her father-in-law. The evidence thus does not establish cruelty against Koutik that he was a man of bad character and was bringing woman of loose morals in the house. He was, therefore, not interested in her. Now from the witness-box she said that her husband was a man of sound morals. In para 12, of her deposition, she made a candid statement that unless Koutik separated from his parents, she would not live with him. She was interested only in the maintenance allowance.

3. Koutik, on the other hand, tried his best to adjust with his wife. But she was in the habit of picking up quarrels on some pretext or the other, give him threats that she would some day burn herself. She was jealous of Koutik’s brother’s wife since the latter was a better cook and Koutik liked the food she cooked for the family.

4. Now that as we see during these 15 years, of married life, after ‘Gauna’, the couple could hardly live together for 1-½ years. The marriage wedlock broke down in 1972 when an attempt was made by the Court to bring them together. The couple lived under one roof for hardly six months. Now eight years have elapsed after the wife left the marital home, never trying to win over the affection of her husband. All that she did was to claim from the husband maintenance allowance and the Magistrate, I am told, has fixed some amount.

5. The finding of the Court below that the appellant was guilty of cruelty against the husband, is evidently very reasonable. Her threats to the husband that she would some day commit suicide, her behaviours in breaking her own head, her nagging tendencies, her insistence that he should separate from his parents and her levelling false charges of adultery and immoral character against her husband fully establish infliction of mental cruelty on him.

6. The appeal has no merit and is dismissed. There shall be no order as to costs.

Appeal dismissed.

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