A Court in Delhi recently granted a mutual-consent divorce to a couple, noting that if the parties are involved in an “acrimonious matrimonial discord” with grave allegations & with no hope of living together, refusing to dissolve the marriage because one party has not been able to prove the fault of the other would amount to forcing the parties to suffer further.
Family Court Judge Harish Kumar said, "Refusal of divorce would lead the parties to face law-induced mental cruelty".
The case in question was of a couple fighting a battle for seven years. They married in 2011 & had a daughter in 2014. The battle also involved the child’s custody. The disputes came to the fore in 2016 when the wife registered a complaint of domestic violence against the husband.
Lawyer Varun Sharma, who represented the husband, welcomed the judgment as a first step towards setting a precedent of a no-fault divorce & lauded the co-parenting approach.
The Court kept both parents as legal guardians of the child for her school, academic activities & extra-curricular development. It directed the mother to get the name of the father added in the daughter’s school records.
Considering that both parents live in same society in Gurgaon, the court granted the father daily access & weekend overnight access to the daughter.
The court directed that the daughter be taken for a consultation with a child psychologist with the clear objective of removing any unfounded fear she may have of her father to ensure that she spends time with him during vacations. It said that the mother being the custodial parent cannot be left unblamed if the daughter does not want to meet her father.
On maintenance, the court said that the expenses claimed by the mother were exaggerated. It divided the cost into need, want & luxury based on the incomes of the parents. The court directed both the parents to bear 50% of the daughter’s expenses that are needs & wants.
The judge said that in the present case, the parties followed the Hindi idiom “tu dal dal, mai pat pat” which loosely translates to “if you are smart, I am smarter”. “Hence, in the peculiar facts of this case, dissolving their marriage... is the only way out to provide quietus to their unending matrimonial acrimony," he added.
Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj, a filmmaker & activist working on men's issues, called the order remarkable & progressive. “There's no point making young men & women do the rounds of courts for years for divorce when the marriage has completely broken down. This judgment by Judge Harish Kumar sets a precedent for its nuances on matters of maintenance, custody & divorce.”
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the LatestLaws staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source Link
Picture Source :
