The Supreme Court on Monday held that a wife has absolute right to claim alimony from her divorced husband, who is under legal obligation to sustain her even if he is jobless, yet capable of earning and supporting himself. The ruling came on a petition filed by a Muslim woman, who dragged her husband to a lucknow family court for maintenance under Section 125 of Criminal Procedure Code, after her five-year marriage ended in a divorce on June 18, 1997. The lower court asked the husband to pay Rs4,000 per month to support the wife and children till the time she remarried. But, the Allahabad High Court reduced this amount to Rs2,000 as the husband took voluntary retirement in April 2012.
Restoring the family court’s order, the apex Bench of Justices Dipak Misra and Prafulla C Pant felt that the High Court showed immense sympathy to the retired husband without reason. It said, “If the husband is healthy, able bodied and is in a position to support himself, he is under the legal obligation to support his wife, for the wife’s right to receive maintenance under Section 125 CrPC, unless disqualified, is an absolute right.”
As per his last drawn salary, the husband earned Rs17,564 monthly. The Bench said: “Solely because the husband had retired, there was no justification to reduce the maintenance by 50 per cent.” The court did not rule out the possibility of the retirement being a ploy to escape liability to pay.
The court held that a woman, constrained to leave her matrimonial home, cannot be compelled to become a destitute or beggar and maintenance should aim at sustenance and not mere survival to ameliorate not only the financial status of the wife but the resultant mental agony and anguish that follows. This principle gets more heightened when kids are with her.