The Bombay high court has held that a wife who leaves her matrimonial home due to a hostile or humiliating environment can still seek maintenance under Section 125 CrPC, even if the husband is not personally proved to have committed any act of cruelty.

The couple married on 16 April 2012. The wife alleged that from the very first day of cohabitation, the husband’s family subjected her to harassment over dowry.

She claimed that on 4 June 2014, she was assaulted by the husband with a waist belt, following which she rushed to a police station and was sent to the Women Cell.

Despite repeated efforts by her and her family to resolve the dispute, she was left with no option but to take shelter at her parental house.

She thereafter approached the family court at Nagpur seeking maintenance, contending that her husband, employed as a Gangman in the Railway Department with a monthly salary of Rs 25,000, had refused and neglected to maintain her.

The family court ruled in her favour.

The husband challenged this order before the high court, arguing that the wife had left without sufficient cause and that her filing of a divorce petition demonstrated her unwillingness to resume cohabitation.

The husband also argued that his wife couldn’t prove negligence by him.
Moreover, on 4.6.2014, the wife eloped from her matrimonial hoise and the divorce petition filed by her was disposed by the family court ex-patr

The court noted that the husband’s cross-examination revealed he had made no effort to find out how his wife was living — a circumstance the court found “sufficient to show that there is refusal and neglect on the part of the husband.”

The Nagpur bench of Justice Urmila Joshi-Phalke, while dismissing the revision application filed by a husband challenging a family court maintenance order, observed that “torture or ill-treatment in the husband’s house would be sufficient for refusal by the wife-claimant to live with her husband, even though husband may not be guilty personally.