In a landmark ruling, the Bombay High Court upheld three sisters’ right to stay in their late father’s property, cancelling eviction orders. The court said daughters’ residence rights under Hindu law must be protected.
Mumbai: On August 14, the Bombay High Court has given a major relief to three sisters, setting aside the orders of the Satara trial court and the district appellate court which had told them to leave their late father’s property. The High Court made it clear that under Hindu law, their right to live in the house is protected.
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Justice Gauri Godse, while deciding the case in favour of the sisters, said,
“Irrespective of whether Rama (father) died before or after 1956, the appellants, being daughters of Rama, had a right to his property. Before 1956, Rama or his heirs, who inherited his property, were bound to maintain the appellants, and on the death of Rama, they were entitled to be maintained out of his estate under a moral, though not a legal, obligation to maintain them. After the 1956 Act, Section 14 has improved their right of maintenance acquired before the 1956 Act, which has culminated in an absolute right. In view of Section 23 of the 1956 Act, the appellants had the right of residence in the dwelling house.”
The land originally belonged to a man named Natha, who had two sons — Rama and Chandar. In a family partition, the land went to Rama. Rama had three sons and three daughters. One of his sons, Laxman, was married to the woman who later filed the court case.
The widow claimed that after another family partition in 1966, this particular property went to her husband Laxman.
According to her, Laxman had allowed his sisters to live in the house only out of sympathy. But after Laxman’s death in 1986, she ended this arrangement and asked them to vacate the house.
The sisters, however, told the court that their father Rama had permitted them to live there for their maintenance and that they had even built the house with their own money.
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One of the sisters, who was widowed in 1949, had moved in while her father was still alive. The other two sisters, who were deserted by their husbands, joined her later — one of them in 1956 along with her infant son.
Despite this, two lower courts had ruled in favour of the widow and ordered the sisters to leave, describing them as “gratuitous licensees” with no permanent right to stay.
Justice Godse disagreed with the lower courts and found it “unbelievable” that the widow’s husband had given them permission to live there when one sister had already moved in before 1966 — the year he got his share of the property.
Quoting legal principles, the Judge said,
“Pre-1956, unmarried daughters, widows or destitute daughters were entitled to be maintained by their father and reside in the father’s property. Hence, in the present case, the right of the defendants to residence prior to 1956 would become an absolute right after the Act of 1956 came into force.”
The Judge further added,
“…Under any contingency, the plaintiff is not entitled to seek possession from the appellants on the ground that they were gratuitous licensees and she terminated it.”
The High Court concluded that the sisters’ right to live in the house “needs to be protected” and therefore cancelled the earlier orders of eviction, dismissing the widow’s case entirely.
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