Delhi High Court Raps Wife For Roping Husband's Relatives In Matrimonial Dispute Sans Evidence, Quashes Summoning Order

The Delhi High Court has quashed a summoning order passed against a husband's distant relatives while rapping the wife for roping them in the matrimonial dispute, without any cogent evidence.

Justice Arun Monga said that the belated addition or introduction of the relatives, who were the husband's cousin and uncles, without a shred of independent evidence, was nothing but the wife's“afterthought to rope in more relatives” in the matrimonial case.

The Court allowed the petitions moved by the relatives seeking quashing of the complaint case registered against them by the wife as well as the order of the trial court summoning them in the matter.

The wife alleged that relatives travelled all the way from Bijnor and Moradabad, where they resided, to Delhi (NCR) to “arm twist” her and committed physical assault upon her, which led to her pressing the charges under Section 323 of the IPC.

She filed a common private criminal complaint wherein the impugned summoning order was passed by Metropolitan Magistrate against the relatives.

Allowing the pleas, Justice Monga said that the wife's allegation of “arm twisting” her by the relatives was a “fine piece of irony”, because if anyone was twisting arms, it was the wife herself.

“Of course, not in the literal sense she claims, but in the far more creative, metaphorical sense of using the criminal process as her personal pressure lever. The oblique motive is hardly a guess i.e. it is either to extract what she calls “maintenance,” which her husband has not paid, or to drag the petitioners all the way from Bijnor to Delhi, making them undergo the harassment and humiliation, until her husband succumbs to her demands on the dotted lines,” the Court said.

It noted that the sole material was the wife's self-serving proclamation that she suffered a “minor injury” supposedly inflicted by the relatives during a scuffle. She produced three witnesses, who were her mother, father and sister.

On this, the Court said that it was not even the wife's case that her parents and sister were present during the alleged incident, while also noting that their depositions were not even placed on record.

“It is obvious that their evidence, therefore, is nothing but hearsay, dressed up as testimony. It may be reasonably presumed that far from being independent, they merely echoed the complainant's version, word for word, as dictated and their testimony has minimal probative value,” the Court observed.

It concluded that the initial report lodged by the wife with the police and their subsequent inclusion in her private complaint filed in court was nothing but a malicious afterthought, “engineered to falsely implicate them and drag them into proceedings in which they had no role whatsoever.”

“The belated attempt to implicate hem five months later betrays her ulterior motive of exerting extraneous pressure. The testimony the respondent's mother and sister, who interested witnesses and were not present at the time of incident is pure hearsay and cannot be given much credence,” the Court said, while quashing the summoning order and consequential proceedings against the relatives.

The trial shall proceed against the other accused in accordance with law, it added.

Title: RAJ KAMAL YADAV & ANR v. SMT. MANJU YADAV & other connected matter

Citation: 2025 LiveLaw (Del) 1112

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