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Seema Kaushal vs Dheeraj Kumar

Transfer Petition (Civil) · 2023 INSC 118Decided 10 Feb 2023
Transfer Petition (Civil) No. 1621 of 2022
V. Ramasubramanian · Pankaj Mithal

Background

The wife sought transfer of her husband's divorce petition from the Family Court at Jaipur, Rajasthan, to the Family Court at Kurukshetra, Haryana. The couple married in 2014; both are government officers posted in Jaipur, with the wife serving as a Deputy Director in the National Health Mission and a Class-I Rajasthan Civil Services officer who has been posted in Rajasthan since 2011. She argued that her father-in-law, a former Assistant Superintendent of Police, was influential in Jaipur, that threats had been made to her, and that their son lives and studies in Kurukshetra where maintenance proceedings had been started.

Decision Breakdown

The Court dismissed the petition. It noted the father-in-law had retired and there was no allegation that he could actually influence the Jaipur Family Court today. Threats, even if real, are a matter of personal security and not by themselves a ground for shifting a case; the complaints about threats and the son's maintenance case in Kurukshetra were all initiated after the divorce petition was filed and looked like an afterthought designed to create grounds for transfer. Crucially, the wife never claimed she was leaving Jaipur or would be living in Kurukshetra; with both spouses residing and working in Jaipur, moving the case to a distant town in another State would inconvenience both of them rather than help.

Lesson Learnt

A transfer of a matrimonial case is decided on genuine convenience and fairness, not on generalised allegations of influence. When both spouses live and work in the same city, courts are unlikely to move the case elsewhere, especially where the grounds relied on arose only after the case was filed.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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