Neither can they force her to pay for the stay, the Delhi high court said while setting aside a trial court verdict.
A married Hindu woman cannot be evicted by her in-laws even if her husband starts living separately. Neither can they force her to pay for the stay, the Delhi high court said while setting aside a trial court verdict.
“It is not necessary that both husband-wife must be staying in a particular house for it to be labelled as matrimonial home of the wife,” the high court said while allowing the plea by one Kavita, whom the trial court had asked to pay rent to her in-laws for staying with her two children in a portion of the disputed ‘Joint Hindu Family’ property after her husband started living elsewhere. The in-laws, too, abandoned their house and sued Kavita and her children for rent and eviction from a portion of the three-storied house.
A bench headed by PK Bhasin scrapped the Delhi trial court verdict directing Kavita to pay Rs3,250 a month. The in-laws didn’t make their son, Kavita’s husband, a party to the proceedings.
Justice Bhasin recalled a Bombay high court judgment defining ‘matrimonial home’ as “the domicile where persons live together, actually or constructively, as man and wife.”
The HC also rejected the father-in-law’s plea that he had built the house from his resources. Kavita maintained that the first floor of the property was her matrimonial home.
“For ousting her from there, they have to first oust their son who only had brought her there and it is in-laws’ own case that they had permitted their son to live there with his wife,” the court noted.
For want of precedents, justice Bhasin relied on what Lord Denning said in 1980. “A wife is no longer her husband’s chattel. She is beginning to be regarded by the law as a partner in all affairs that are their common concern. Thus the husband can no longer turn her out of the matrimonial home... Moreover it has been held that the wife’s right is effective, not only as against her husband but also as against the landlord...”
Thus, the parents must obtain a decree of possession against their son first to get back the possession from his wife.
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