A division bench comprising Justices Vibha Kankanwadi and Rohit Joshi, in its December 11 order, noted that the woman’s four-year-old daughter is being withheld from her despite a lower court’s custody order.
Bombay: The Bombay High Court has ruled that preventing a child from meeting her mother constitutes “cruelty” under Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code. The court refused to quash an FIR filed against the in-laws of a woman from Jalna, Maharashtra.
A division bench comprising Justices Vibha Kankanwadi and Rohit Joshi, in its December 11 order, noted that the woman’s four-year-old daughter is being withheld from her despite a lower court’s custody order.
The bench emphasized that “keeping a four-year-old child away from her mother causes mental harassment, amounting to cruelty, and inflicts grave injury to the mother’s mental health.”
BRIEF FACTS
The FIR, registered in 2022, accuses the woman’s father-in-law, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law of cruelty, harassment, and criminal intimidation. The complainant, married in 2019 and a mother by 2020, alleged that her husband and in-laws began demanding money from her parents, abusing her physically and verbally. In May 2022, she was allegedly evicted from her matrimonial home without her daughter.
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A magistrate’s court later directed the husband to hand over custody of the child to the mother in 2023, but the order was not followed. The high court noted that the in-laws were complicit in concealing the husband’s whereabouts, which amounted to contempt of judicial orders.
The in-laws, however, denied the allegations, claiming they were falsely implicated. The court concluded that the case did not merit quashing the FIR, as the mental harassment was ongoing and constituted a “continuing wrong.”
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