Mumbai: Bombay HC on Wednesday held that not letting a child meet her mother amounts to “cruelty” under IPC, and refused to quash an FIR against the in-laws of a Jalna-based woman.
A bench of Justices Vibha Kankanwadi and Rohit Joshi noted that the woman’s four-year-old daughter is being kept away from her despite a lower court’s order. “Keeping a young child of four years away from her mother also amounts to mental harassment, amounting to cruelty in as much as it would certainly cause grave injury to the mental health of the mother,” it said. Such behaviour by the in-laws amounts to cruelty as defined under Section 498-A of IPC, it added.
“The mental harassment is continuing from day to day till date. It is continuing wrong (sic),” the bench observed.
The woman’s father-in-law, mother-in-law and sister-in-law had sought quashing of the 2022 FIR registered against them in Jalna district for alleged cruelty, harassment and criminal intimidation. The bench refused to quash the FIR, saying it was not a fit case for the court to interfere.
As per the complainant, the woman got married in 2019 and had a daughter the following year. But the husband and his family members started demanding money from her parents and abused her physically and verbally, she claimed. In May 2022, the woman was allegedly thrown out of her matrimonial house and not allowed to take her daughter with her, the complaint said. The woman then filed an application before a magistrate’s court seeking her daughter’s custody.
In 2023, the court ordered the husband to hand over custody of the child to the mother, but the order was not complied with and the child continued to remain with the husband, the woman said in HC.
The bench noted that although the child was with the husband, the applicants (the in-laws) were assisting him by keeping his whereabouts secret. Those who do not have respect for judicial orders are not entitled to relief, HC said.
In their petition, the in-laws denied the allegations of cruelty and harassment and claimed to have been implicated in a false case. PTI