The Bombay High Court has dismissed a revision petition filed by a Railway Department employee challenging a Family Court order directing him to pay maintenance to his estranged wife, ruling that his own indifference to her welfare, not her departure from the matrimonial home, defined the central legal question in this case. The order sustaining graduated maintenance of Rs.5,000, Rs.6,000, and Rs.7,000 across successive periods from 2017 to the present, sends a pointed message: a husband cannot weaponise a wife's flight from abuse to deny her the very relief the law was designed to provide.
Married on April 16, 2012, the wife alleged that trouble erupted from the very first day she moved into her matrimonial home, with her husband's family raising demands over insufficient dowry and subjecting her to sustained physical and mental harassment. The breaking point came on June 4, 2014, when her husband allegedly beat her with a waist belt, driving her to flee to a police station; she was subsequently referred to a Women's Cell. With reconciliation efforts by her family yielding nothing, she eventually took refuge at her parental home and, finding no alternative, filed both a maintenance petition and a divorce petition before the Family Court at Nagpur.
The husband struck back on a single central argument, that it was the wife who had voluntarily abandoned the matrimonial home and that her concurrent divorce filing proved she had no intention of resuming marital duties, thereby disentitling her from any maintenance whatsoever.
The revisional court found the husband's case to be undermined not by the wife's testimony alone, but by his own conduct and admissions. His cross-examination of the wife failed entirely to dislodge her account of the assault or her subsequent visit to the police station, with the entire line of questioning focused narrowly on the divorce petition rather than the core allegations of violence.
More damaging still, the husband admitted in cross-examination that he had filed no document showing where the wife was residing and confessed he did not even know whether she was living in a rented house, a fact the court found "sufficient to show that he has not taken care of his wife even after marriage."
He had also chosen not to contest the divorce petition despite having been duly served. Anchoring its reasoning in the Supreme Court's binding framework in Rajnesh v. Neha, and the settled position that neglect or refusal under Section 125 CrPC can be established entirely through a husband's conduct rather than express words, the court concluded that the Family Court's maintenance award was just and reasonable. The revision was dismissed, with a direction that all arrears be cleared within one month.
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