Indian man granted divorce after wife refuses to live with in-laws

Activists say Supreme Court ruling has left women vulnerable

India’s Supreme Court has granted divorce to a man on the grounds of “cruelty” after his wife refused to share a home with her in-laws, effectively ruling that a married woman must live with her husband’s family.

Justice Anil R Dave, one of India's most senior judges, said the wife’s desire to leave her in-laws’ home was inspired by “western thought” and violated traditional Indian Hindu values. “In normal circumstances, a wife is expected to be with the family of the husband after the marriage,” stated the Supreme Court ruling, which also dismissed the wife’s attempt to kill herself as a plot to “torture” her husband and his relatives.



The judge said the wife’s claims that her husband, who is from the southern Indian state of Karnataka, was having an affair were fabricated, and that her suicide attempt was a devious attempt to manipulate her husband’s family. He focused on the “tremendous stress” the husband might have faced if she had succeeded in killing herself. “One can imagine how a poor husband would get entangled into the clutches of law [after a suicide], which would virtually ruin his sanity, peace of mind, career and probably his entire life,” the judgment said.



The court added that a suicide attempt alone was grounds for ending a marriage. “In our opinion, only this one event was sufficient for the appellant husband to get a decree of divorce on the ground of cruelty,” it said. “It is not a common practice or desirable culture for a Hindu son in India to get separated from his parents on getting married at the instance of the wife, especially when the son is the only earning member in the family,” the ruling said.

Activists said the ruling left millions of women who were in unhappy marriages or with abusive husbands even more vulnerable. “If you look at the language the court has used, it’s very regressive,” said Tenzing Chusang, from the Women’s Rights Initiative, a lawyers’ collective. “If you make the grounds of divorce very lenient for men, it makes the woman very vulnerable.”



Chusang added, “In India there’s no such thing as shared matrimonial property or equal division of assets. All she gets if the husband divorces her, and that too after years of litigation, is a minimal maintenance payment. What can she do? She has to stay.”

“The court is emphasising that it’s the son’s duty to look after his parents,” said Chusang. “So basically it’s saying that [a daughter] is not really part of the family. She’s going to leave, she’s never going to look after her parents in old age, and therefore she has no value.”

This article originally appeared on the Guardian.