Jharkhand HC refuses divorce: a wife wanting a separate flat is not cruelty, living apart is not desertion

A division bench of Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Pradeep Kumar Srivastava upheld the Ranchi Family Court, holding that a husband who admitted he stopped paying rent on the flat where his wife and two daughters lived had proved neither cruelty nor desertion under Section 13(1) of the Hindu Marriage Act.

The Jharkhand High Court has refused to dissolve a marriage solemnised at Arrah in 2007, holding that a Ranchi man who sought divorce for cruelty and desertion had proved neither. A division bench of Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Pradeep Kumar Srivastava on 29 October 2026 dismissed Swami Nandan Singh's first appeal against the Principal Judge, Family Court, Ranchi, who had rejected his petition under Section 13(1)(i-a) and (i-b) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 in May 2025. Writing for the bench, Justice Prasad held that a wife's wish for a separate flat is not cruelty by itself, that complaints to the police and the State Women Commission are not cruelty unless shown to be knowingly false, and that a husband who admitted he stopped paying rent on the flat where his wife and two daughters were living could not treat their continued separation as her desertion.

A 2007 marriage, a 2017 walkout and a mediation that did not hold

Swami Nandan Singh, about 50, of Vir Kunwar Singh Colony, Hinoo, married Priya Bhardwaj alias Priya Singh on 25 November 2007 in an arranged match at Arrah, Bihar. Two daughters were born, in February 2009 and December 2014. His plaint in Original Suit No. 478 of 2020 described a wife who refused to accept the three children of his late sister living in the house, pressed him to send his ailing father back to the ancestral village, swallowed 20 sleeping pills in an episode that ended a pregnancy, abused him as idiot, dog and behuda, scratched him with her nails, tore his clothes, threatened suicide, and on 4 May 2017 left with the daughters and her belongings without telling him. A month later, he alleged, she came with her parents and others, operated the couple's joint bank locker and took away his late mother's jewellery.

He had first sued for restitution of conjugal rights under Section 9 in Original Suit No. 532 of 2017, and in 2018 the couple settled before the Mediation Centre, Ranchi, agreeing to resume a peaceful conjugal life on terms. The wife was then pursuing a B.Ed. course from her parental home at Arrah; the daughters were to be admitted to a school in Ranchi. By the husband's account she refused to live in the matrimonial home with his father and said she would not return until the house was transferred to her name, so he took a rented flat at Singh More, Hatia. There, he said, she assaulted him with fists and kicks on 29 September 2018 until neighbours intervened, and the daughters eventually went to live with her under pressure. Her parents moved in, he stopped visiting, and he filed for divorce. He also alleged that she had lodged a false criminal case against him at a police station in Bihar to humiliate him.

The wife's written statement admitted the marriage and the daughters and denied the rest. Her version: 200 grams of gold, 400 grams of silver, household articles and Rs 3.5 lakh in cash were given at the wedding; her husband lost his job at Konark Cement because of his temper and began assaulting her; two pregnancies miscarried, on 5 August 2008 and 12 May 2014, which she attributed to his assaults; after the second daughter he pressed her for a son and for a sex-determination test; an assault on 9 April 2011 injured her eardrum. She said she complained to the State Women Commission on 10 April 2017 over his demand for Rs 3 lakh, that on 4 May 2017 he beat her and threw her and the daughters out, that he came to Arrah on 31 May 2017 and assaulted her and her parents, and that she wrote to the Nawada police station in Arrah by registered post on 8 June 2017. After the mediation, she said, he kept her out of the matrimonial home even though the family had four flats in Ranchi, put her in a 3BHK flat at Rs 6,000 rent plus Rs 1,000 maintenance, paid for a few months, and from March 2019 stopped paying rent or household expenses, leaving her to borrow Rs 3 lakh from relatives and pay school fees of Rs 3,775 and Rs 3,800 a month for the two girls herself.

The Family Court sent the parties to a mediator again; that failed. It framed seven issues, including whether the husband had been treated with cruelty and deserted since 4 May 2017 and whether he was taking advantage of his own wrong, and dismissed the suit by judgment of 2 May 2025, with the decree signed on 16 May 2025.

Four witnesses, photocopies and a cross-examination full of admissions

The husband examined himself as PW4 along with a friend (PW1), his niece (PW2) and his brother-in-law (PW3). His documents, all photocopies marked for identification only, were a Dena Bank letter of 27 July 2017, the mediation report of 27 March 2018, prescriptions from RINPAS, Ranchi, in his name and wedding photographs. In chief he repeated the plaint, adding that she sent money to her father from the bank account, that he had to take psychiatric treatment, and that he lost his job in May 2019 as a result of her conduct.

Cross-examination hurt him. He admitted he had no documentary evidence that his wife consumed sleeping pills or that she sent money to her father. He had never complained to the police about her. He had not been allowed to meet his daughters for four years but had never applied to any court for access. He took the Singh More flat in April 2018, paid the last rent in April 2019 and stopped because her parents had come to live with her. He could not say when he applied to the bank for the CCTV footage he claimed showed her taking a potli from the locker. He conceded that his father was treated at Raj Hospital by a doctor related to his wife, and that the marriage was smooth until then. He also admitted filing an RTI application asking how she had secured admission to the B.Ed. course.

His witnesses did no better. The friend could not say when she had left, conceded that the husband's father owned three other houses, and could not say she had taken the mother's ornaments. The niece did not know the locker was in the wife's name and knew nothing about any demand for a male child, but did know a maintenance case was pending. The brother-in-law said he had little knowledge of the couple's relationship, could not say who operated the locker, and knew nothing of any police case, the Wagon-R car or the motorcycle.

The wife testified as RW1 with her aunt Reeta Singh (RW2) and her brother (RW3), and filed twelve documents: Dr Samit Lal's prescription of 9 April 2011 for the ear injury, locker papers of 15 May 2013, a jewellery list, her Women Commission application, the police application and its registry receipt, the husband's RTI application, a Punjab National Bank statement and school fee records for both girls. The bench recorded that she and her witnesses stayed consistent in cross-examination: she denied leaving on her own, denied operating the locker alone or taking her mother-in-law's jewellery, and repeated that after the mediation she was kept out of the matrimonial home, put in a rented flat and then left to pay the rent herself with help from others.

Perversity, not a fresh guess, is the test on first appeal

Mr Atanu Banerjee, for the husband, argued that the Family Judge had not weighed all the documentary and ocular evidence, that the wife's false criminal cases were themselves cruelty once they failed, and that evidence of fists, kicks and filthy abuse had been ignored; the judgment, he said, was perverse. Mr Dilip Kumar Karmakar, for the wife, replied that the Family Court had considered the whole record, that the husband had given up a restitution suit after mediation and then sued for divorce, which showed he simply wanted to live apart, and that on his own admission it was he who stopped staying in touch and moved to a separate flat.

The bench first set out its own powers. Under Section 19(1) of the Family Courts Act, 1984, an appeal lies both on facts and on law, which the court treated as parallel to Section 96 of the Code of Civil Procedure. Relying on Jagdish Singh v. Madhuri Devi, (2008) 10 SCC 497, it accepted that a first appellate court may reappraise the entire evidence and reach its own conclusion. The standard of proof is the civil one: under Section 3 of the Indian Evidence Act a fact is proved on the preponderance of probability, and A. Jayachandra v. Aneel Kaur, (2005) 2 SCC 22, had said proof beyond a shadow of doubt has no place in a dispute between husband and wife. But because the husband pitched his case on perversity, the court drew on Arulvelu v. State, (2009) 10 SCC 206, and Damodar Lal v. Sohan Devi, (2016) 14 SCC 197: a finding is perverse only if it ignores relevant material, relies on irrelevant material or so defies logic as to be irrational; inadequacy of evidence or a different possible reading of it is not perversity.

On cruelty the judgment walked through the Supreme Court's line from N.G. Dastane v. S. Dastane, (1975) 2 SCC 326, and Shobha Rani v. Madhukar Reddi, (1988) 1 SCC 105, to V. Bhagat v. D. Bhagat, (1994) 1 SCC 337, Vijaykumar Ramchandra Bhate v. Neela Vijaykumar Bhate, (2003) 6 SCC 334, Joydeep Majumdar v. Bharti Jaiswal Majumdar, (2021) 3 SCC 742, Vishwanath Agrawal v. Sarla Vishwanath Agrawal, (2012) 7 SCC 288, K. Srinivas Rao v. D.A. Deepa, (2013) 5 SCC 226, Ravi Kumar v. Julmidevi, (2010) 4 SCC 476, Vinita Saxena v. Pankaj Pandit, (2006) 3 SCC 778, and Manish Tyagi v. Deepak Kumar, (2010) 4 SCC 339. The thread it drew: cruelty has no fixed definition, may be mental or physical, intentional or not, must be judged against the parties' social milieu and way of life, and must be grave and weighty rather than the ordinary wear and tear of marriage. Physical violence is not necessary, but the conduct must be so abnormal and below the accepted norm that the other spouse cannot reasonably be expected to put up with it.

On desertion it quoted the Explanation to Section 13(1), Rayden on Divorce and Halsbury's Laws of England, and the Supreme Court in Debananda Tamuli v. Kakumoni Kataky, (2022) 5 SCC 459, following Lachman Utamchand Kirpalani v. Meena, AIR 1964 SC 40. Two things must be shown against the deserting spouse, the fact of separation and the intention to end cohabitation permanently, and two against the deserted spouse, absence of consent and absence of conduct giving the other reasonable cause to leave. The physical act of departure does not make the leaver the deserter, and the burden of proving every element lies on the spouse seeking divorce.

A separate flat, two complaints and a psychiatric prescription: why none of it was cruelty

Applying that law, the bench found serious allegations and thin proof. The sleeping-pill story fell with the husband's admission that he had nothing to prove it; both sides had made allegations about the pregnancies, and without reliable evidence the incident could not be treated as a proved act of cruelty. The supporting witnesses backed the allegations in chief, but their cross-examination showed they had little personal knowledge of several of the disputed incidents.

The demand for a separate flat drew the judgment's most general observation. A spouse's unreasonable conduct must be distinguished from a demand for a separate residence that arises from the circumstances of the marriage. A preference for independent accommodation cannot in every case be treated as cruelty; the surrounding circumstances, the needs of the parties, their obligations to dependent family members and the manner of the demand all have to be weighed. The parties had indeed lived at Singh More after the mediation, but on the husband's own account he arranged the flat because she would not live with his father, while she said he would not let her into the matrimonial home. A demand for separate accommodation without sufficient evidence of accompanying oppressive or abusive conduct could not be elevated into matrimonial cruelty.

The complaints to the Women Commission and the police were next. Filing a criminal complaint against a spouse, the court held, does not automatically amount to cruelty; what matters is the nature of the allegations, the circumstances, the complainant's conduct and the outcome. Knowingly false and reckless allegations of a serious nature may be cruelty if they are established to be false, but “a complaint cannot be treated as false merely because the other spouse disputes it”, or because the complainant fails to prove it to the requisite standard. The husband asserted the complaints had been dismissed as baseless; the wife said she went to the authorities because she had been assaulted and thrown out. Nothing before the court cogently showed she had knowingly made false allegations to injure him.

The RINPAS prescriptions were relevant to the husband's mental condition, but receiving psychiatric treatment does not by itself prove that the other spouse caused it; a causal link had to be assessed on the evidence, and was not made out. The locker allegation failed on his inability to say when he sought the CCTV footage and on his own witness's inability to say whether she had taken any jewellery; she said she withdrew her own. Matrimonial discord and the breakdown of normal marital relations, the bench concluded, are not by themselves cruelty under Section 13(1)(ia), and the allegations had not been established with enough cogency to disturb the Family Court's finding.

The rent he stopped paying

On desertion the court accepted that the parties had lived apart since 2017, but prolonged separation is not enough. The husband had to prove that his wife abandoned the marriage without reasonable cause, without his consent and intending to end cohabitation for good. The admitted facts cut against him. He had sued for restitution in 2017, the parties settled in mediation and contemplated resuming married life, and she then came to Ranchi and lived at Singh More in a flat he arranged. The later separation unfolded amid continuing disputes over residence, family responsibilities and financial support. His admission that he stopped paying the rent in April 2019 because her parents had moved in, and his statement that he stopped meeting her for the same reason, meant the separation could not be judged by her departure in May 2017 alone. Her consistent case that she was compelled to leave and did not voluntarily abandon him found support in those admissions and in the fact that the disputes continued after the settlement. The required intention on her part to abandon the marriage without reasonable cause had not been established; the statutory requirement, the bench said, is “not merely prolonged separation but desertion as understood in matrimonial law”.

Order

The bench held that the Family Judge had consciously considered the oral and documentary evidence and that the judgment of 2 May 2025 and the decree of 16 May 2025 in Original Suit No. 478 of 2020 did not fall within the fold of perversity. First Appeal No. 136 of 2025 was dismissed and pending interlocutory applications were disposed of. The appeal was reserved on 14 September 2026 and pronounced on 29 October 2026; Justice Pradeep Kumar Srivastava agreed with the judgment authored by Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad. The judgment is marked AFR and carries the neutral citation 2026:JHHC:31665-DB.