NEW DELHI: In a significant ruling on Tuesday, the Supreme Court said a qualified woman’s decision to pursue her profession and create a stable environment for her child cannot be treated as “cruelty” or “desertion” in a marriage, setting aside what it called the “regressive” and “ultra-conservative” findings of lower courts in a matrimonial dispute, PTI reported.A bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta said the family court and the Gujarat high court had adopted a “feudalistic” approach in branding the woman’s efforts to continue her career as a dentist as grounds for divorce.The top court, however, upheld the divorce between the estranged couple solely on the basis of the irretrievable breakdown of marriage, not on the allegations of cruelty or desertion levelled against the wife, according to PTI.The case involved a dentist and her husband, a lieutenant colonel in the Indian Army, who married in 2009. After initially moving with her husband to his posting in Kargil, the woman later shifted to Ahmedabad during pregnancy and after their daughter developed seizure-related medical complications, in order to access specialised treatment and a more stable environment. She also set up a dental clinic there.The family court had granted divorce to the husband, holding that the wife had prioritised her career over matrimonial obligations and had failed in her “bounden duty” to live wherever her husband was posted. The high court later upheld that view.Writing the verdict, Justice Mehta said such reasoning was rooted in “deeply-entrenched archaic societal assumptions” and was legally untenable.“We are well into the 21st century and yet an attempt by a qualified woman to pursue her professional career and to secure a safe and stable environment for the upbringing of her child has been treated as an act of cruelty and desertion by the courts below,” the bench observed, as quoted by PTI.The Supreme Court said marriage does not erase a woman’s individuality or subordinate her identity to that of her spouse.“It must be emphasised that a well-educated and professionally-qualified woman cannot be expected to be confined within the rigid boundaries of matrimonial obligations alone. Marriage does not eclipse her individuality, nor does it subjugate her identity under that of her spouse,” the court said.The judges also underscored that balancing marital ties is a shared responsibility and one spouse cannot unilaterally dictate the life choices of the other.The court refused the husband’s plea to prosecute the woman for perjury, noting that he had remarried and the woman herself was no longer interested in reconciliation. It also ordered that the adverse observations made by the lower courts against her be expunged from the record.Calling the lower courts’ reasoning “deeply disquieting”, the Supreme Court said what had been portrayed as defiance was in fact an assertion of independence, and what was labelled desertion was actually shaped by professional commitments, the welfare of the child and practical realities of life.
