The High Court of Karnataka has granted divorce to a 42-year-old woman from her 53-year-old husband on the grounds of causing mental cruelty to her as he treated her as a “cash cow” to repay the huge debt of his family members and his financial needs sans any emotional ties with her.
A Division Bench comprising Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice J.M. Khazi passed the order recently while allowing the woman’s appeal against the Family Court’s order of rejecting her plea for divorce.
The Bench noted that the Christian couple married in 1999 and a daughter was born to them in 2001. And husband’s family had financial issues, resulting in fights and arguments between parents, siblings and children, and the husband was unable to take care of the financial needs of his wife.
With this background, she moved to UAE in 2008 and started working in a commercial bank and even started paying the debts of family members of her husband and bought some agricultural properties in his name.
In 2012, she realised that her husband and his family members were draining her financially as well as emotionally and initially decided to seek divorce from him but the husband bluntly refused her proposal, the Bench pointed out.
Later, with an object of giving her marriage another chance, she took her husband to UAE in 2012 and set up a salon there for him with an investor visa. However, by the end of 2013, he expressed the intention to go back to India and failed to become financially independent despite efforts made by her.
The Bench noticed from the evidences that she had spent approximately ₹60 lakh on her husband and his family members and has been living away from her daughter.
Finally, she filed petition for divorce in 2017 before a family court, which in 2020 dismissed the plea stating that she had failed to prove that her husband had caused mental agony even though the husband did not even respond to the family court’s notice. However, husband’s lawyer defended family court’s order before the High Court.
The Bench, from the evidences and statement of the wife recorded before the family court, found that the “husband has treated her as a cash cow and had a materialistic attitude towards her. The husband had no emotional ties with the wife.”
“The attitude of the husband in itself has caused mental agony and emotional trauma to the wife, which is sufficient to make out a ground of mental cruelty, and family court had grossly erred in not appreciating the testimony of the wife,” the Bench observed while granting divorce on the grounds of cruelty under Section 10(X) of the Indian Divorce Act, 1869.
