Ram Charan v. Sukhram
Background
The appellants were the legal heirs of Dhaiya, a woman belonging to a Scheduled Tribe (Gond), who sought partition of ancestral property that had belonged to her father, one of whose six children she was (five sons, one daughter). Because the family belongs to a Scheduled Tribe, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 does not apply to them by virtue of its own Section 2(2). The Trial Court and First Appellate Court dismissed the suit, holding that the plaintiffs had failed to prove any tribal custom giving daughters an equal share, and the High Court agreed, treating the absence of proof of an inclusive custom as fatal to the claim.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that the lower courts had wrongly assumed an exclusionary custom (that daughters get nothing) and placed the burden on the plaintiffs to disprove it: an assumption rooted in patriarchal Hindu-law thinking that had no place here, since neither side had actually proved any custom on inheritance one way or the other. Where no personal law or established custom governs a question, courts must fall back on the principle of "justice, equity and good conscience," preserved under Section 6 of the Central Provinces Laws Act, 1875 (a saving clause kept it alive even after the Act's 2018 repeal). Applying that principle alongside the constitutional guarantee of equality under Article 14 (and pointing to the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, which made daughters coparceners precisely to end this kind of gender discrimination) the Court held that in the absence of any proven custom excluding women, denying Dhaiya's heirs an equal share would itself be discriminatory. It set aside the lower courts' judgments and allowed the appeal, declaring the appellants entitled to an equal share.
Lesson Learnt
Where a community's inheritance custom is genuinely unproven or silent, neither side can show what the custom actually says, courts should not default to denying women equal rights; they must apply justice, equity, good conscience and constitutional equality instead. This principle particularly protects Scheduled Tribe women, who fall outside the Hindu Succession Act's statutory protections.