New Delhi: In a significant win for partners seeking to establish adultery allegations in divorce proceedings, the Supreme Court has upheld a Delhi High Court ruling that allowed a woman to obtain her husband’s hotel booking information and call detail records (CDRs).
The Delhi High Court (HC) had in a May 2023 order allowed the wife’s request to obtain her husband’s CDRs, while noting that the husband’s right to privacy was not absolute in this case. A Supreme Court (SC) bench of Justices Manmohan and K. Vinod Chandran reaffirmed the same.
The husband challenged the HC order in the apex court. Dismissing the husband’s challenge, the SC said that “no interference” was called for with the earlier judgment.
The HC had essentially upheld a 2022 family court order, allowing the wife’s plea. She sought the information in support of her plea to divorce her husband on the ground of adultery.
The HC, in a bid to balance the husband’s right to privacy against the wife’s plea for his call records, ruled that, “Section 151 of the CPC (Civil Procedure Code) preserves the inherent powers of the court to make such orders as may be necessary for the ends of justice. In matrimonial proceedings, such powers stand enlarged by Section 14 of the FC (Family Courts) Act.”
Essentially, the law at play in this case was Section 14 of the Family Courts Act, which allows family courts to accept any report, statement, or document as evidence that may, in its opinion, help it deal effectually with a dispute, even if it would be otherwise relevant or admissible under the Indian Evidence Act, 1872.
The legislative intent behind the provision is clear: the family court, “unlike an ordinary civil court, is not straitjacketed by technical rules of evidence, and is empowered to adopt procedures to ascertain the truth,” the Delhi HC pointed out in the 2023 judgment.
Different high courts, different orders
Although the Supreme Court has now upheld the Delhi HC’s approach, at the high court level there is still a lack of uniformity when it comes to courts summoning call records in matrimonial disputes.
While some say the court’s decision to call for CDRs depends entirely on the facts of a case, others argue that the decision depends on a host of factors such as the prevailing social context, the existence of a prima facie case, and the approach adopted by the court.
The divergence is reflected in a series of High Court rulings in matrimonial or divorce cases. In Vishal Vashisht vs. Natasha Sharma (2022) and Harpreet Singh vs. Gurpreet Kaur (2022), the Punjab and Haryana High Court held that the privacy of a third party cannot be violated merely because one spouse suspects the other of being involved in an illicit relationship.
Directing that the production of mobile tower location details or CDRs of a third party, who is not even a party to the proceedings, would violate that person’s informational privacy and would amount to the court collecting evidence on behalf of a litigant, the court had said that such a move is “impermissible”.
A similar view was taken by the Karnataka High Court in Vishwas Shetty v. Preethi K. Rao, which held that a litigant cannot seek the court’s assistance to collect evidence by calling for the records of a third party merely on the basis of allegations of an extramarital affair.
Likewise, the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Neha v. Vibhor Garg observed that merely because family courts are not bound by the strict rules of evidence does not mean they are free to admit evidence obtained in violation of an individual’s right to privacy.
Delhi-based family lawyer Manish Tiwari said the differing outcomes are largely because Section 14 of the Family Courts Act gives judges considerable discretion when deciding whether to summon such records.
“Section 14 is clear that the rules of evidence will not apply. The only issue courts look at while deciding whether to call for CDRs is whether, prima facie, a case is made out. If that threshold is met, courts may allow it. However, a roving enquiry cannot be conducted on the basis of suspicion alone. The bottom line is that it depends from court to court, and is influenced by the prevailing social culture and the understanding of a particular judge,” Tiwari told ThePrint.
Lawyers weigh in
On 29 August 2025, the Delhi High Court dealt with a similar case where a two-judge bench was hearing the wife’s plea alleging that her husband was maintaining “adulterous relations”. In support of her contention, she had provided the court with details of travel, stay, and communication of an allegedly “intimate nature”.
Once the foundation of adultery is pleaded, the law does not mandate “ritualistic reproduction of the precise words”, the court had said, adding that the pleadings must, with “reasonable clarity”, convey allegations of adultery.
Dismissing the husband’s allegations that the wife was venturing into “a roving and fishing enquiry”, the court said that by allowing production of documents directly pertinent to the issues in dispute, the family court had ensured the wife’s access to necessary evidence. In doing so, the court upheld the 2025 family court order allowing the wife access to the CDRs as well.
Granting the relief, the court directed the husband to supply her with documents relating to his hotel bookings. The husband had challenged this order before the top court, but failed.
Malavika Rajkotia, who represented the wife in the similar case before the Delhi HC in February, last year explained how the tension between privacy concerns and the need to gather evidence is intrinsically tied to the fault theory, which states that a marriage can be dissolved if a spouse can prove it suffered due to the ‘fault’ of the other party. She said, “As long as the fault theory is there, such cases will keep coming to the court.”
The other party has the right to demonstrate and prove adultery if it is alleged in the case, Rajkotia said, adding that Section 14 allows family courts to accept evidence that would otherwise not be admissible in most cases. “The provision drops the threshold of acceptable evidence. It may be intrusive to some, but in the current legal system, we don’t have a choice,” she said.
Advocate Dharmender Arya said that although the right to privacy is a fundamental right otherwise, in matrimonial cases, exceptions are usually made. “Under Hindu law, marriage is a sacred union. However, if one spouse is breaching this sacred union, the other party has the right to prove it.”
The inevitable conclusion, however, is that it entirely depends on the facts of the case whether CDRs will be summoned by the court, said family lawyer Varun Aggarwal.
“Legal opinion is equally divided on the issue. On one hand, there are judgments which say that you can’t obtain CDRs or financial details from banks in matrimonial or divorce cases, but on the other, there are cases where this has been permitted. However, courts have to be mindful that the spouse may not have any other way of gathering evidence,” Aggarwal added.
What about adultery cases?
In peculiar circumstances, such as adultery cases, courts allow the summoning of call detail records, Aggarwal said.
Recalling a case he appeared in where he managed to obtain the other side’s call records, Aggarwal said, “Even if the call detail records are called for, they are not in themselves conclusive proof of adultery. All these records show is that you have been in contact with someone. They do not reveal the contents of the conversations that took place.”
In a nutshell, call detail records simply indicate that a conversation took place between two numbers, but they are not conclusive proof of adultery.
In the 2025 ruling discussed earlier, the Delhi HC also noted that in matrimonial disputes where adultery is alleged, it is a clandestine act and is rarely accompanied by direct proof. Courts have consistently held that in such cases, proof may often be circumstantial, and evidence of association, hotel stays, or patterns of communication may constitute relevant circumstances.
“CDRs and tower location data, if appropriately circumscribed to a defined period, serve as corroborative material to either establish or negate the charge of adulterous association,” the court said, adding that such material cannot be dismissed as a roving enquiry as it is directly relevant to the issue.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)