Hospital receipts but no doctor in the witness box: unsubstantiated mental disorder claims against a spouse amount to legal cruelty, the Karnataka High Court has observed, and a husband who relied on such papers alone could not obtain a divorce on that ground.
Kalaburagi: A husband who sought divorce from his wife on the grounds of cruelty and mental disorder has lost his appeal in the Karnataka High Court, which held that he proved neither and observed that unsubstantiated claims of mental disorder or absent-mindedness against a spouse themselves amount to legal cruelty [A v. B].
The appeal, Miscellaneous First Appeal No. 200994 of 2023, was decided on September 24, 2026 by a Division Bench of Justice Ashok S. Kinagi and Justice Subramanya Rangarao, with the judgment authored by Justice Rangarao. It upheld the October 12, 2022 judgment of the Principal Judge, Family Court, Bidar, in M.C. No. 54/2021. The reported judgment does not name the parties, who are referred to here as the husband and the wife.
Papers do not prove themselves
The Court began its discussion with this observation:
“Unsubstantiated claims of mental disorder or absent-mindedness amount to legal cruelty, as they attack a person’s core dignity and right to live a dignified, peaceful life with reputation on the touchstone of Article 21 of the Constitution of India, inasmuch as such allegations would leave an unfavourable imprint on the life of a person in a civilized society”
The husband had marked hospital receipts (Exs. P9 and P10) and hospital reports (Exs. P11 and P12), but he examined neither the treating doctor nor any expert. The Bench held that producing a document does not prove it:
“…mere production and marking of a document during evidence does not establish its contents.”
His own cross-examination weighed against him as well. He accepted that he held no psychiatrist’s certificate about the wife’s alleged absent-mindedness, and he admitted that his petition and affidavit had described her as mentally sound. The Bench said the Family Court was justified in rejecting that ground.
A marriage of about four weeks
The couple were married on May 19, 2019 at the Tirumala Tirupati Temple in Andhra Pradesh according to Hindu rites. The wife left the matrimonial home on June 25, 2019, so they lived together for about four weeks. A legal notice dated March 25, 2020 from the husband asked her to return, and he then petitioned for divorce under Section 13(1)(ia) and (iii) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, on grounds of cruelty and mental disorder.
The husband alleged that the wife did no household work, sat aloof and was absent-minded, and that she had a mental disorder for which he took her to a doctor in Kalaburagi, Fortis Hospital in Bengaluru and NIMHANS. He further alleged that she and her parents left the hospital without telling him. The wife denied every allegation. She said her parents had spent Rs 6 lakh at the engagement and given 20 tolas of gold and other articles worth Rs 5 lakh, that the husband is 15 years older than her and did not perform conjugal rights from the date of marriage, and that he never tried to bring her back.
She also counterclaimed for compensation. The Family Court dismissed both the divorce petition and the counterclaim.
Cruelty, desertion and irretrievable breakdown
On cruelty, the Bench found “absolutely no material” and held that pleadings cannot be taken at face value:
“The allegations or averments in the pleading cannot be taken at face value; they must be corroborated by oral and documentary evidence and established in the manner known to law.”
A togetherness of about four weeks would “rarely give rise to allegations of cruelty by the wife”, it added. The husband had made no effort to bring the wife back and admittedly never filed a petition for restitution of conjugal rights. The Bench read Section 13(1A)(ii) of the Act to mean that divorce on the ground of no restitution of conjugal rights for a year or more presupposes such a decree or petition, which was absent here.
To argue that irretrievable breakdown justifies divorce, the husband relied on Supreme Court decisions including Naveen Kohli v. Neelu Kohli, Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan and Roopa Soni v. Kamalnarayan Soni. The Bench held that those decisions were rendered in the exercise of power under Article 142 of the Constitution, and said:
“The Appellant’s contention that there is an irretrievable breakdown of marriage also cannot be considered as a ground for grant of divorce, inasmuch as the same is not found as one of the ingredients in the statute book to be a ground for grant of divorce.”
The Bench extracted the Supreme Court’s 2006 recommendation in Naveen Kohli that the Union consider amending the Hindu Marriage Act to add irretrievable breakdown as a ground. It concluded that no case for interference was made out, and the appeal was dismissed.
The legal position
Section 13(1)(ia) allows divorce where the other spouse has treated the petitioner with cruelty, and Section 13(1)(iii) where the other spouse has been incurably of unsound mind or has suffered continuously or intermittently from a mental disorder “of such a kind and to such an extent that the petitioner cannot reasonably be expected to live with the respondent”. In Samar Ghosh v. Jaya Ghosh [(2007) 4 SCC 511], a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court held that mental cruelty has no fixed definition and has to be judged case by case from the overall pattern of conduct, with no need for physical violence.
What the ruling restates
The burden of proving cruelty or mental disorder lies on the spouse who alleges it, and exhibiting a medical receipt or report does not prove what it says. A claim that a spouse is mentally ill needs the treating doctor or an expert in the witness box, and a petition that describes the spouse as mentally sound undercuts it.
The opening observation also speaks to the other side of the table. By tying baseless allegations of mental illness to the dignity guaranteed by Article 21, the Bench signals that such claims can themselves be treated as cruelty. The appeal itself, however, was decided on the husband’s failure of proof and on the absence of a statutory ground of irretrievable breakdown.
Case Title: A v. B [MFA No. 200994 of 2023 (FC)]
Neutral Citation: 2026:KHC-K:10230-DB
Bench: Justice Ashok S. Kinagi and Justice Subramanya Rangarao, Karnataka High Court, Kalaburagi Bench
Date of Judgment: September 24, 2026
Appearances: Mr. Prakash Yeli, Advocate, for the appellant-husband; Mr. S.B. Hangarki, Advocate, for the respondent-wife