Kolkata(Ap.14): The Calcutta High Court recently dismissed a wife’s appeal challenging a family court’s order granting her husband divorce after the division bench found the woman’s attempt to separate her husband from his parents and family amounted to cruelty.
The man can file the petition on the grounds of mental cruelty if compelled to stay away from his parents for no justifiable reason, the High Court reportedly added.
On March 31, a division bench comprising of justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar dismissed the plea stating that a son living with his parents was “absolutely normal in Indian culture and ethos,”. It was the “pious obligation of the son to live and maintain the parents,”
The case goes back to 2009, when a family court in West Midnapore granted Prashant Kumar Mandal divorce from his wife Jharna on grounds of cruelty. The woman appealed the order, which led to the hearing before the high court bench.
According to the family court’s decision, Jharna had been publicly insulting Prashant, calling him unemployed and a coward since their marriage in 2001. Prashant, who worked part-time as a teacher and a private tutor, would sometimes ask Jharna to assist with their finances.
Jharna, in turn, filed a criminal case against him and his parents, accusing them of torture, which eventually thwarted Prashant’s attempt to secure a government job.
“Normally, no husband would tolerate such acts of wife and no son would like to be separated from his parents and other family members. The persistent effort of the wife to constrain the husband to be separated from the family would be torturous for the husband,’’ the bench ruled.