In December 1999, P. Veerabhadra Rao’s daughter got married and moved to the United States. After 16 years of marriage, she filed for divorce, which was granted by mutual consent in February 2016 by a circuit court in Louis County, Missouri. All their material and financial possessions were settled through a separation agreement. She subsequently remarried in May 2018.
Three years later, Rao filed a preliminary report against his daughter’s former in-laws in Hyderabad, seeking the return of their “streedhan”. The former in-laws tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Telangana High Court to dismiss the preliminary report. They subsequently appealed the High Court’s decision to the Supreme Court.
“A bench of Justices JK Maheshwari and Sanjay Karol quashed the case against the in-laws and said the father had no locus standi to claim back his daughter’s ‘streedhan’ as it belonged solely to her. “The generally accepted rule, which has been judicially recognised, is that the woman exercises an absolute right over the property,” said Justice Karol, who wrote the judgment,” the Times of India news report stated.
“The jurisprudence, as developed by this court, is unequivocal with regard to the singular right of the woman (wife or ex-wife, as the case may be) to be the sole owner of the ‘streedhan’. A husband has no right, and so it must necessarily follow that a father also has no right when the daughter is alive, well and fully capable of taking decisions such as pursuing the cause of recovery of her ‘streedhan’,” the court said.
“The purpose of criminal proceedings is to bring a wrongdoer to justice, and it is not a means of taking revenge or seeking vengeance against persons with whom the complainant may have a grudge,” he added. There were several factors that worked against the father in this case. For one, he waited more than two decades after the marriage, five years after its end and three years after his daughter’s remarriage before initiating legal action to claim his ‘streedhan’. Moreover, Judge Karol noted that the father did not have his daughter’s authority to claim recovery of her ‘streedhan’, which further weakened his claim.
The court also noted that the father had not produced any evidence that ‘streedhan’ was given to his daughter during their 1999 marriage. Also, neither party raised the issue of ‘streedhan’ during their separation agreement in 2016. “There is no evidence to suggest that the alleged ‘streedhan’ was in the possession of the daughter’s in-laws,” SC said.
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