The Allahabad High Court has firmly shut down a husband's attempt to wriggle out of paying interim maintenance to his wife, upholding a family court's direction to pay Rs.4,000 per month and delivering a pointed reminder that financial hardship is not a legal shield against matrimonial obligations.
Tej Bahadur Maurya had approached the High Court challenging a family court order awarding his wife interim maintenance during the pendency of their matrimonial dispute. His case rested on two pillars: first, that the family court failed to account for his modest means as a labourer; and second, that his wife was living with another man and had even signed a mutual separation affidavit. The wife, however, successfully dismantled the second argument before the trial court, contending that the joint affidavit had been obtained through deception, given her limited educational background.
She further established that she bore sole responsibility for maintaining the children with no independent source of income. The trial court accepted her version, and the High Court, on appeal, found no reason to take a different view, particularly since the husband offered no substantive evidence to support his claim of being an impoverished labourer.
A division bench of Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Vivek Saran had little patience for the husband's financial plea, finding it unsupported and, more fundamentally, legally irrelevant. The Court observed that the amount awarded was entirely reasonable given present-day living costs, and that the husband's vague invocation of poverty, unaccompanied by any documentary proof, deserved no weight.
Anchoring its reasoning in the bedrock principle of spousal obligation, the bench declared, "Once a man marries a woman, he is bound under the law to maintain her, such of those who feel that they cannot maintain a wife and children if the marriage goes sour, ought not to get married in the first place at all."The appeal was accordingly dismissed in its entirety.
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