New Delhi, India

The High Court in the Indian city of Calcutta, in a recent ruling, said a man can file a divorce petition if forced to separate from his parents by his wife. This comes after the two-judge bench said that a son living with his parents is “absolutely normal in Indian culture and ethos,” reported Times of India. 

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The division bench comprising Justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar of the High Court of Calcutta, as per media reports, allowed the filing of an appeal based on mental cruelty if he was forced to stay away from his parents for no genuine reason. 

The over-a-decade-old case involved Prashant Kumar Mandal and his wife Jharna who filed for a divorce in 2009, eight years after the couple got married and it was granted by the West Midnapore family court. However, Jharna went on to file an appeal with the High Court challenging the cruel grounds of her divorce decree. 

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Additionally, Jharna reportedly had publicly insulted Prashant, calling him “unemployed” and a “coward”, which is what the family court had based their decision on. As per media reports, at the time Prashant was teaching part-time schools as well as conducting private tuitions. However, his income was not sufficient to support the family and asked Jharna who was earning Rs. 1,400 ($17.05) per month to help out, reported the TOI. 

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The verdict was announced on March 31, earlier this year, during which the bench also noted that the “Indian culture nurtures the concept of a pious obligation of the son to maintain his parents. If a wife attempts to deviate the son from society’s normal practice and normal custom, she must have some justifiable reason for that.”

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It added, “The wife wanted the husband to get separated from his family. It is not common practice for a son in India to get separated from his parents at the instance of the wife,” as per TOI. Therefore, the bench opined that the desire to have a separate residence with her husband and away from her in-laws was not based on “justifiable reasons” and “amounts to cruelty”. 

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They also went on to call her supposed persistent effort to separate the man from his family “torturous”. “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 bench opined, as per the TOI. 

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