‘Wife’s career choice is not cruelty or abandonment’: Supreme Court slams lower courts’ ‘feudal’ thinking

New Delhi: In a major ruling, the Supreme Court on Tuesday said a qualified woman’s decision to pursue her career and create a stable environment for her children cannot be considered “cruelty” or “abandonment” in marriage, setting aside what it called a “regressive” and “ultra-conservative” verdict of a lower court in a matrimonial dispute, PTI reported.A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta said the family court and the Gujarat High Court had adopted a “feudalistic” approach in using the woman’s efforts to continue her dental career as grounds for divorce.However, the Supreme Court only upheld the divorce between the estranged couple on the basis of the irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, rather than allegations of abuse or abandonment against the wife, according to the Press Trust.The case involved a dentist and her husband, a lieutenant colonel in the Indian Army, who married in 2009. Initially moving to Kargil with her husband for his posting, the woman later moved to Ahmedabad to get specialized treatment and a more stable environment during pregnancy and after her daughter developed epilepsy-related complications. She also established a dental clinic there.The Family Court granted the divorce to the husband, finding that the wife put her career ahead of her marital obligations and failed to fulfill her “duty” to reside wherever her husband was posted. The High Court later upheld this view.Justice Mehta, writing the judgment, said such reasoning was rooted in “deeply held ancient social assumptions” and was legally untenable.“We have entered the 21st century, but a qualified woman’s attempt to pursue her career and secure a safe and stable environment for the growth of her children has been deemed cruel and abandoned by the lower courts,” PTI quoted the judge as saying.The Supreme Court said marriage does not erase a woman’s personality or subordinate her identity to that of her spouse.“It must be emphasized that a well-educated and professionally qualified woman cannot be expected to confine herself within the strict boundaries of marital obligations. Marriage does not obscure her personality nor does it subjugate her identity to that of her spouse,” the court said.The judges also emphasized that balancing a marriage is a shared responsibility and that one spouse cannot unilaterally determine the life choices of the other.The court rejected the husband’s request to sue the woman for perjury, noting that the husband had remarried and the woman herself was no longer interested in settling the case. It also ordered that adverse lower court opinions against her be expunged from the record.The Supreme Court called the lower court’s reasoning “deeply troubling” and said the alleged rebellion was actually an assertion of independence, while the alleged abandonment was actually dictated by professional commitments, the welfare of the children and the practical circumstances of life.