The Punjab and Haryana  high court has upheld a couple’s divorce in January 2023, as the woman used to force her husband to get separated from his parents. She had left him after he refused to do so.

The husband has shown evidences which proves that the wife was constantly harassing him to live separately from his parents and was also insisting upon him to open his clinic in Jalandhar, where her parents live. Later, when he refused to do so, she started staying at her parents’home.

Even after this, the husband, after their child’s birth, visited her along with gifts, sweets, clothes, etc and requested her parents to let his wife accompany him. But her parents insisted on a separate residence for their daughter and made it clear that only then would she and the child accompany him.

The division bench, comprising Justice Ritu Bahri and Justice Manisha Batra also took notice of the false implication of the man and his family by his wife in a criminal case in which they were later acquitted.

The HC dismissed the woman’s plea challenging the order dated October 15, 2015, passed by a family court in Jalandhar, in which her husband’s petition for dissolution of marriage was allowed.

In this case, the couple was married in November 1990 according to Hindu rites. After marriage, they lived together as husband and wife but the woman refused to live in a joint family. She did not want her husband to start his medical practice in Oel village of Himachal Pradesh’s Una district, where his family was residing. In January 1992, the woman left her husband when she was pregnant. She gave birth to a male child at her parent’s native village Hazara in Punjab’s Jalandhar district. The man and his family visited Hazara along with customary gifts, sweets, clothes, etc and requested his in-laws to let her accompany him. However, her parents insisted on the condition of a separate residence.

After examining both sides, the division bench found that the marriage between the couple had broken down irretrievably and there was no chance of their coming together or living together again. The court also noticed that the woman had filed an application under Section 12 of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, which was dismissed for the non-appearance of the appellant-wife.

Dismissing the wife’s appeal, the HC upheld the divorce awarded by the Jalandhar family court but ordered the man to pay an amount of Rs 15 lakh to his ex-wife as permanent alimony.

The bench also observed that ” if parties are not able to serve the very objective of the marriage of companionship for each other from the very inception and living apart for a long time amounts to irretrievable breakdown of the marriage.”

The court therefore upheld the divorce.