Maintenance Rights :Wife blames in-laws, accuses husband of affair with his sister-in-law; court finds claim false, denies her maintenance |

NEW DELHI: The Madhya Pradesh high court has held that a wife is not entitled to maintenance merely because she chose to live separately due to a lack of harmony with her in-laws, or because her husband paid attention to his parents, observing that a son looking after his parents is a normal part of family life, in its order dated July 8.What was the issueJustice Jai Kumar Pillai was hearing a husband’s plea challenging a family court order from Ratlam that had directed him to pay Rs 20,000 a month in maintenance — Rs 10,000 to his estranged wife and Rs 5,000 each to their two children. The family court had accepted the wife’s argument that she was living separately because relations with her in-laws were strained, and also because her husband paid more attention to his parents than to her, as per the court order.However, the husband argued that this reasoning ignored Section 125(4) of the CrPC, which says a wife is not entitled to maintenance if she refuses to live with her husband without sufficient reason.He further pointed out that a cruelty case his wife had filed against him and his family had ended in acquittal and his relatives were discharged in 2016, and he himself was acquitted in 2019. A separate family court order had already found that his wife, not him, had been cruel, including by falsely accusing him of an affair with his sister-in-law.What did the court sayThe high court said that the family court had made a serious mistake in its reasoning. It added that simply not getting along with in-laws, or a husband spending time caring for his parents, is never a good enough reason for a wife to leave the marital home and then ask for maintenance.“The expectation that a husband must severe ties with or withdraw attention from his parents to appease his wife is legally recognized as unreasonable,” the court said.Citing a Supreme Court ruling, the court noted that it is unreasonable to expect a husband to cut ties with or stop attending to his parents just to keep his wife satisfied, and that looking after one’s parents is a widely accepted part of Indian family life.“A valid and sufficient reason in law implies circumstances such as complete neglect, deprivation of fundamental rights by the husband, failure to protect the wife from severe cruelty, or subjecting her to continuous physical or mental abuse,” the court added.The court also relied on the earlier finding, from a related family court case, that the wife had made an unproven and damaging allegation of an affair between her husband and his sister-in-law — which it described as amounting to serious mental cruelty against the husband and not the other way around.On this basis, the court set aside the Rs 10,000 monthly maintenance awarded to the wife and dismissed her maintenance application altogether.However, the court made clear this didn’t affect the children. It held that a father’s duty to support his children stands regardless of disputes with his wife, and — rather than simply leaving the earlier amount untouched — actually raised the children’s maintenance from Rs 5,000 each to Rs 7,500 each per month, taking their combined support to Rs 15,000 a month.