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Legal Case Shots

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Family LawSupreme Court of India

Aparna Ajinkya Firodia vs. Ajinkya Arun Firodia

Civil Appeal · 2023 INSC 146Decided 20 Feb 2023
Civil Appeal No. 1308 of 2023
V. Ramasubramanian · B.V. Nagarathna

Background

The appellant-wife and respondent-husband married in 2005 and had two sons, born in 2009 and 2013. In 2016 the husband discovered messages suggesting his wife was having an affair, and in 2017 he filed for divorce alleging adultery. He privately got a DNA test done on the younger son at a private lab in 2016, which showed a 0% probability that he was the biological father. In 2020, during the divorce proceedings, he applied to the Family Court, Pune, for a court-directed DNA test of the child to prove the wife's infidelity. The Family Court allowed this, and the Bombay High Court upheld that order, reasoning the husband had shown a strong prima facie case and that any adverse consequence of the wife refusing the test could be handled through an adverse inference under Section 114 of the Evidence Act, without disturbing the child's legal legitimacy under Section 112. The wife appealed to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that Section 112 of the Evidence Act treats a child born during a valid marriage (where the spouses had access to each other) as having "conclusive proof" of legitimacy, rebuttable only by proof of non-access between spouses at the relevant time, and since the husband himself had pleaded that he continued living with and did not challenge access to his wife around the time of conception, this conclusive presumption applied and could not be sidestepped. The Court rejected the husband's argument that only the separate, discretionary presumption under Section 114 (allowing an adverse inference from refusal to answer/comply) was in play, holding that Sections 112 and 114 operate in entirely different registers and a party cannot use Section 114 as a backdoor to defeat Section 112's conclusive proof. The Court emphasized that a DNA test can only be ordered where there is a strong prima facie case and "eminent need," and that the child's own right to identity and privacy, not merely the interests of the feuding parents, must be central to the analysis; a child cannot be turned into a pawn or subjected to DNA testing merely to help one parent prove adultery when other evidence (call recordings, a diary) was available. The appeal was allowed, the High Court and Family Court orders were set aside, and the husband was directed to pay Rs. 1 lakh in costs to the wife, while leaving him free to prove the adultery allegation through other evidence.

Lesson Learnt

A husband cannot obtain a court-ordered DNA test of a child born during a subsisting marriage merely to prove his wife's infidelity, especially where he has not shown non-access to her at the relevant time; courts must weigh a child's independent right to identity and privacy above a parent's litigation strategy, and other evidence of adultery must be exhausted or shown to be genuinely unavailable before resorting to DNA testing of the child.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)
Aparna Ajinkya Firodia vs. Ajinkya Arun Firodia – Legal Case Shots | LegalAware