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KOLKATA: “Once in a blue moon” visits do not amount to a shared conjugal life, Calcutta high court said on Jan 8 while granting divorce to a couple living apart since 2015, ruling that a marriage stripped of empathy cannot be sustained. The court dissolved the marriage but allowed the father monthly access to his son. A division bench of Justices Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya and Supratim Bhattacharya held that irretrievable breakdown of marriage qualifies as cruelty under Special Marriage Act, extending a 2023 Supreme Court ruling under Hindu marriage law to cases governed by the 1954 statute. The wife, a medical professional posted in Kurseong in north Bengal’s Darjeeling district, approached the HC after a lower court in 2022 refused divorce on grounds of cruelty and desertion. The couple married in 2007, lived in Howrah and had a son in 2011. Her earlier postings were in Malda and Birbhum, both in south-central Bengal, before she returned to Howrah and later moved to Kurseong. She argued they had been living separately since 2015, with only occasional visits by the husband and no marital relationship. She also complained the trial court had blocked testimony from her colleagues about alleged abuse at her workplace, even refusing video-conference evidence on grounds of “insufficient infrastructure”. The HC disagreed, finding cruelty and desertion proved. It said the husband admitted living separately except for stray visits and failed to back claims of brief cohabitation. It also faulted rejection of video evidence on flimsy grounds. Judges pointed to contradictions in the husband’s stand – opposing divorce while seeking continued access only to the child. “When the convivial atmosphere is lost in a matrimonial relationship and all empathy dries up, nothing remains in the marriage for it to be sustained,” the court said, declaring the marriage irretrievably broken. The husband may meet the child once a month, on the first Sunday, for two hours at a public place.
