Gurugram: A Fatehabad man’s attempt to escape paying maintenance to his wife and minor son by arguing that her earlier marriage never legally ended has failed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which held that such an objection cannot by itself defeat a woman’s claim under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
Justice Mandeep Pannu dismissed a revision petition filed by Jagga Ram against a Fatehabad family court order directing him to pay Rs 7,500 a month—Rs 5,000 to his wife Neelam Rani and Rs 2,500 to their minor son Manpreet, until the child attains majority.
Neelam Rani had told the family court that she married Jagga Ram on 12 December 2015, according to Hindu rites, and that Manpreet was born of the marriage. She alleged she was thrown out of her matrimonial home after being harassed for dowry, and that her husband, despite having the means, had refused to support her and their son.
Jagga Ram contested the claim on a technical ground: he told the court Neelam Rani’s first marriage was still subsisting on the date she married him, without a divorce decree from her first husband, making their own marriage null and void—and her, by extension, not a ‘wife’ entitled to maintenance under the law.
He also pointed to a nullity petition he had filed under the Hindu Marriage Act, still pending in the family court, and to an earlier maintenance petition of hers that had been dismissed for default. She was an educated woman working as a schoolteacher, he argued, and capable of supporting herself.
The family court was not persuaded, and awarded maintenance in January this year. Jagga Ram then moved the high court, leaning heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2005 verdict in Savitaben Somabhai Bhatiya vs State of Gujarat, which had held that a woman cannot claim maintenance as a ‘wife’ if her marriage is void because an earlier one was still subsisting.
Justice Pannu found that reliance misplaced. The judge pointed to a more recent Supreme Court ruling—Smt N. Usha Rani vs Moodududla Srinivas, decided in January 2025—which she said had substantially reshaped the legal position. That verdict, tracing the law back through Chanmuniya vs Virendra Kumar Singh Kushwaha, held that ‘wife’ under Section 125 deserves a broad, expansive reading, protecting even those women whose marriages carry a legal cloud, so long a reasonable period as husband and wife has been lived together.
A man, the top court had said, cannot enjoy the benefits of a de facto marriage while dodging its obligations.
The high court held that Savitaben Bhatiya “cannot be mechanically applied” to every case where the subsistence of an earlier marriage is raised as a defence, and that Neelam Rani and Jagga Ram’s admitted years of cohabitation and their son’s birth could not be brushed aside on a technicality.
On the other objections, the court was equally unmoved. An earlier maintenance plea dismissed for non-prosecution, the judge noted, was “fundamentally different” from a case decided on merits and could not bar Neelam Rani from approaching the court afresh.
And her employment as a teacher, the court said, was not by itself grounds to deny her maintenance altogether; entitlement had to be weighed against the actual means and circumstances of both parties.
Calling the Rs 7,500 monthly award “modest” and nowhere close to excessive, Justice Pannu declined to interfere, noting that a revisional court does not substitute its own view for that of the trial court unless the order is perverse or illegal. Section 125, the court said, is a measure of social justice whose purpose cannot be defeated by technicalities.
The revision petition was dismissed on 6 August, with the maintenance order left undisturbed.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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