Threatening suicide amounts to cruelty: HC

Threatening to send your spouse to jail by attempting to die by suicide amounts to cruelty and can be a ground to seek divorce under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Bombay high court recently held.

- Prateem Rohanekar

MUMBAI:

A single-judge bench of justice RM Joshi dismissed an appeal filed by a woman who had challenged a family court's order granting divorce to her husband after finding that she had subjected him to cruelty.

The husband had approached a family court in 2017 for divorce after eight years of marriage. He claimed that his wife often threatened to die by suicide and blamed him and his aged parents for it.

During one such incident, she even cut her veins, but the suicide attempt was unsuccessful. To avoid scrutiny, when she was called in the witness box, she hid the injury marks by applying mehendi on her hands, he added.