Female teacher’s divorce petition approved, husband used to behave cruelly

Raipur. Chhattisgarh High Court, overturning the order of Raipur Family Court, has approved the petition of a female teacher for divorce from her husband. The court has accepted that abusing a teacher’s wife in front of tuition students is ‘mental cruelty’. The court also said that misbehavior by the husband would not only tarnish the wife’s image in the society but would also amount to mental cruelty under the Hindu Marriage Act.
The division bench of Justices Gautam Bhaduri and Deepak Kumar Tiwari heard the plea of a woman seeking divorce from her husband on the grounds of cruelty. The petition alleged that when the wife worked and sometimes came home late, the husband used to question the wife’s character. When the wife called the children to her home and started teaching them tuition, the husband started speaking in abusive language.

The court said that raising questions on the wife’s character would naturally tarnish the wife’s image in the society, especially in front of the students. The wife was not initially accepted by her in-laws because it was a love marriage. The woman argued that her husband was unemployed and hence she took up a job in a school to support the family.

Due to workload she sometimes came home late. Due to this, her husband doubted her character and often accused her of having illicit relations with some male colleagues. On this he left the job but started taking tuition at his home. Even at home, her husband started abusing her. This started happening every day, due to which students stopped coming for tuition. On April 9, 2015, her husband threw her out of the house and he made no efforts to bring her and their daughter back.