Ramchander v. Ananta
Background
A husband and wife, both government employees in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, married in 1994 and had a son in 1996. The wife left the matrimonial home in 2003 and did not return, and the husband sued for divorce alleging mental cruelty (frequent forced relocation due to her conduct, verbal abuse of him and their son, refusal to do housework, an earlier, later withdrawn, dowry-harassment complaint, and an unproven affair allegation she made against him) and desertion. The trial court granted the divorce, but the Calcutta High Court's Circuit Bench at Port Blair reversed it on appeal, and the husband then appealed to the Supreme Court.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that allegations of mental cruelty must be assessed cumulatively but still require actual evidence, and found the husband had failed to substantiate most of his claims: no independent witnesses supported the relocation or abuse claims, and the minor son's testimony (he was only 7 at the time of the alleged events) was rightly given little weight by the High Court. On desertion, the Court found credible, unrebutted testimony from three independent witnesses that the spouses were still living together as late as 2005, undermining the husband's claim that the wife deserted him in 2003. It also rejected the "irretrievable breakdown of marriage" argument as an independent ground, since that is not a statutory ground for divorce under the Act. Finding no error in the High Court's reasoning, the Supreme Court dismissed the husband's appeal.
Lesson Learnt
In matrimonial cruelty and desertion cases, courts require real, corroborated evidence rather than bare assertions or a child's recollection of events from early childhood, and "irretrievable breakdown of marriage" alone is not a ground for divorce under the Hindu Marriage Act unless it falls within a statutorily recognised ground like cruelty or desertion.