New Delhi. The Supreme Court said in a historic decision that a woman’s stridhan is her absolute property. He has full right to spend it as per his wish. It can never become joint property with her husband. The court held that the husband can use it in times of crisis but it is the husband’s responsibility to return it or its value to the wife. The bench of Supreme Court judges Justice Sanjeev Khanna and Justice Dipankar Dutta, using its power under Article 142 of the Constitution, ordered the husband to pay financial compensation of Rs 25 lakh for snatching all the jewelery of his wife.
The woman is now 50 years old, keeping in mind the increase in the cost of living and the interest of equity and justice, an order was given to pay compensation to the woman. The Supreme Court set aside the Kerala High Court’s April 5, 2022 decision, which had set aside the 2011 order of the Family Court to recover Rs 8,90,000 as value of gold from the husband and mother-in-law while granting divorce. .
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The bench rejected the High Court’s argument that depriving a newly married woman of all her gold jewelery on the first night itself was not credible. The bench said that greed is a powerful motivator and it prompts humans to commit heinous crimes. Thus, we do not find it beyond the scope of human possibility for a husband to commit such unacceptable and undesirable acts against his wife (as was alleged).
In fact, the wife had claimed that on the first night of their marriage in 2003, her husband had taken all her jewelery with her mother-in-law for safekeeping. However, the High Court blamed the lack of goodwill on the part of the woman due to the petition filed in the year 2009, whereas the relationship between the husband and wife had ended in 2006 itself. On this, the Supreme Court said that matters of marriage can rarely be said to be simple or straightforward and hence the human response according to a mechanical timeline before breaking the sacred bond of marriage is not what one would expect.
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Tags: Husband Wife Dispute, Kerala News, Supreme Court
FIRST PUBLISHED: April 25, 2024, 22:58 IST