Patna High Court refuses divorce on vague adultery plea, affirms Family Court dismissal in ex parte matrimonial appeal

A division bench of the Patna High Court has dismissed a husband's appeal seeking divorce, holding that a vague allegation of adultery without naming the alleged paramour, without specific dates and places, and without impleading him cannot sustain a decree under Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act.

The Patna High Court has dismissed a husband’s appeal seeking divorce on the ground of adultery, holding that a vague allegation unsupported by specific dates, places, the name of the alleged paramour in the plaint, or the paramour’s impleadment cannot sustain a decree under the Hindu Marriage Act. The division bench affirmed the Principal Judge, Family Court, Siwan’s decision to dismiss the divorce petition even though the wife had not appeared and the matter had proceeded ex parte.

Justices Nani Tagia and Alok Kumar Pandey decided Miscellaneous Appeal No. 92 of 2020 on 4 May 2026, with Justice Pandey writing for the bench. The appeal was directed against a judgment of 12 July 2019 in Divorce Case No. 216 of 2012. The respondent-wife did not appear either before the Family Court or before the High Court, despite two rounds of notice in the appeal. That did not change the outcome.

The husband, Shyam Bihari Mishra, was married to Sanju Devi on 22 March 2003 according to Hindu rites. His case in the divorce petition was that conjugal life had remained good for the first two years, after which the wife’s behaviour had changed. He alleged she began visiting markets without his knowledge, was seen in the company of other men, and on 15 October 2012 went out from 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., returning from a cinema hall with a male person whose name was later said to be Dhananjay Tiwary of village Mahana/Mahaua. Four witnesses, including the husband himself, deposed in the Family Court.

The pleadings problem

The central failure, in the High Court’s reading, was not that the wife was absent or that the husband’s witnesses were disbelieved. It was that the plaint itself did not plead adultery with the specificity the law requires. The bench worked through paragraphs 8, 11, 12 and 14 of the divorce petition and found that the document nowhere stated the name of any paramour, the dates and places of alleged adulterous conduct between 2003 and 2012, or the circumstances on which the allegation rested. The single date offered — 15 October 2012 — placed the wife at a market and then at a cinema hall in male company, but did not by itself amount to adultery.

The word “paramours” appeared in the plural, but no name was disclosed. The name Dhananjay Tiwary surfaced only when the husband stepped into the witness box. The bench observed that the appellant’s assessment was “based on suspicion” and that the plaint did not even reveal who had informed him of any illicit relationship or when. Paragraph 14 of the petition expressly stated that the respondent had not revealed the name and parentage of any paramour — an admission, in the Court’s view, that the pleading rested on conjecture.

There was a second, related problem: the man named in evidence as the paramour was never impleaded as a party. The Court treated this as fatal. When an allegation of adultery is made in matrimonial proceedings, the person against whom that allegation is made must be on the record and must be given the opportunity to defend himself. Dhananjay Tiwary was never made a party, and so the imputation against him stood “left undefended.”

Evidence cannot travel beyond pleadings

The Family Court had recorded that the husband failed to prove illicit relations and had not established that the wife was living with another person after deserting him. The High Court agreed and went further on the legal foundation. The bench held that the evidence the husband led — including naming Dhananjay Tiwary and describing the trip to village Mahana to confirm the alleged affair — was beyond what the plaint pleaded. Evidence travelling outside the pleadings, the Court said, is liable to be rejected and cannot ground a decree.

To anchor that proposition the bench drew on a long line of Supreme Court authority: National Textile Corporation Ltd. v. Nareshkumar Badrikumar Jagad (2011) 12 SCC 695, which in turn relied on Trojan & Co. v. Nagappa Chettiar AIR 1953 SC 235, State of Maharashtra v. Hindustan Construction Co. Ltd. (2010) 4 SCC 518, and Kalyan Singh Chouhan v. C.P. Joshi (2011) 11 SCC 786. The Court also cited Bachhaj Nahar v. Nilima Mandal (2008) 17 SCC 491 for the principle that no amount of evidence can be looked into on a plea never put forward in the pleadings, and that a court cannot make out a case not pleaded or grant relief which does not flow from the cause of action alleged.

The Delhi High Court’s decision in Prakash Rattan Lal v. Mankey Ram, ILR (2010) III Delhi 315, was cited for the related observation, drawn from Ram Sarup Gupta v. Bishun Narain Inter College (1987) 2 SCC 555 and Harihar Prasad Singh v. Balmiki Prasad Singh (1975) 1 SCC 212, that the purpose of pleadings is to bind parties to a stand and prevent litigation from being expanded through evidence the other side has had no chance to meet.

What Section 13 demanded that the plaint did not supply

Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 sets out grounds for divorce, including voluntary sexual intercourse with any person other than the spouse, and desertion. Both grounds require pleading and proof of specific facts — not generalised assertions. The bench read the plaint and the depositions side by side and concluded that there was no averment which constituted a ground of adultery, desertion, or any other ground under Section 13. That conclusion was decisive: without a pleaded foundation, no quantum of ex parte evidence could supply what the pleadings lacked.

The desertion plea fared no better on the facts. The Court found no cogent material to show that the wife had left because of an illicit relationship, or that she was now living with another man. The husband’s case was that the relationship deteriorated after two years of marriage, but he could give no specific date from which the conduct of the wife became hostile, no chronology between 2003 and 2012 beyond the one incident of October 2012.

Order

The bench dismissed the appeal and affirmed the Family Court’s judgment and decree of 12 July 2019. Pending interlocutory applications, if any, were also disposed of. The husband’s divorce petition stands rejected, the marriage subsists, and the costs of the procedural shortcomings — an unimpleaded paramour, an unparticularised plaint — lie where they fell.