Allegations of sexual perversity against husband amount to mental cruelty, ground for divorce: Court

New Delhi: Raising questions of sexual perversity against a husband amounts to mental cruelty and justifies the grant of divorce, the Delhi High Court has said while upholding a lower court order dissolving a marriage.

The high court also dismissed the allegations of a woman that her husband was indulging in immoral act by compromising with the privacy of the bedroom with their eight-year-old daughter.

Dismissing the allegations, a bench of Justices Pradeep Nandrajog and Pratibha Rani said the wife had damaged the very basic fabric of marital bond beyond repair and maligned the "pious relationship" between a father and a daughter.

"It sounds paradoxical that wife was not letting the husband to have physical contact but the husband was blamed for keeping condoms accessible to their eight years old daughter and also for waking up the daughter in the midnight to witness their sexual activity.

"The allegations of sexual perversity against the husband amounted to mental cruelty, justifying a decree of divorce," the bench said in its judgement.

The court's verdict came on a petition by the woman who had approached the high court challenging a trial court order of July this year dissolving the marriage on a plea filed by her husband.

While upholding the trial court's decision, the high court observed that she had levelled "baseless and unsubstantiated" charges against her husband and "no spouse can swallow such filthy allegations and also continue with the marital tie."

"The pious relationship between a father and a daughter has been maligned by the wife to such an extent that the wife is guilty of treating the husband with the worst form of mental cruelty.

"The nature of allegations made against the husband which remained unsubstantiated, must have left an indelible mark on the mind of the husband," the bench said.

The couple had married in February 2005 and the marital discord between them started in 2005. They lived together till October 2012. In December 2012, the man filed a plea before the trial court seeking dissolution of marriage.

The trial court granted divorce on the ground that the husband was subjected to mental cruelty by her.

The high court, in its judgement, noted that the wife, "inspite of making serious allegations against the husband impacting his moral character with perverse sexuality, did not even try to prove such allegations while tendering her affidavit by way of examination-in-chief. This leads to the inference that such allegations were baseless".