RAIPUR: Observing that a wife’s visit to her husband’s office and use of abusive language and threats amounted to cruelty, the Chhattisgarh High Court on Monday upheld a Raipur court’s ruling granting divorce on these grounds to a man.
Rejecting the appeal of 34-year-old Nalini Mishra, who had earlier challenged a family court’s order, a division bench of Justices Goutam Bhaduri and Radhakishan Agarwal observed that the appellant (Mishra) abused her husband, 32-year-old Surendra Patel, a government employee, for trivial issues.
This drove him to lodge several complaints against Mishra, including abusive behaviour, being a spendthrift and making baseless allegations of an extramarital relationship between him and a female colleague while seeking his transfer also amounted to cruelty, the high court held.
While the verdict was delivered on August 18, procedural delays caused it to be uploaded on the HC website on Monday. Patel, a resident of Dhamtari in Chhattisgarh, married Mishra, a widow, and a Raipur resident, in 2010 and had a child.
Later, a distressed Patel filed a plea in a Raipur family court seeking divorce, citing various grounds of cruelty inflicted by his wife. After evaluating the facts and evidence on record related to the case, a Raipur family court granted Patel a divorce decree in December 2019. This was subsequently challenged by Mishra in the HC.
During hearings in the high court, Mishra’s advocate Shishir Srivastava submitted that the family court failed to appreciate the cruelty that Patel meted out to his client. Claiming that Mishra’s statements showed that Patel tried to cook up evidence to get a divorce, Srivastava sought the high court’s intervention.
Appearing on behalf of Patel, advocate C Jayant K Rao argued that reports to the police in 2017 revealed the state of affairs between the parties. Patel faced not only character assassination with allegations of an extramarital relationship, but Mishra created a scene at her husband’s office. She also sent ‘complaint letters’ to the CM, seeking Patel’s transfer.
“The wife used to visit the office of the husband to hurl abusive language against him, assuming him of illicit relations that led to tarnishing the image of husband before the colleagues and his stature certainly goes down,” the HC said.