Divorced after a few months of marriage, woman asked for Rs 500 crore alimony, court made shocking decision

 After the suicide incident of AI engineer Atul Subhash, another similar new case has come to light. In this case, the husband and wife got divorced after a few months of marriage. After this the woman asked for alimony of Rs 500 crore from her husband. The matter reached the Supreme Court and then the top court has given an important decision. Actually, this story is of an Indian-American citizen who runs a successful IT consultancy in America. He married a woman from India on 31 July 2021. However, this was her second marriage. Before this he was divorced from his first wife. He had given an amount of Rs 500 crore to his first wife as maintenance allowance.

marriage broken within a few months

The man’s second marriage also broke. In the second marriage the man stayed with his wife only for a few months. Then both of them got divorced. After this divorce, the woman demanded equal maintenance from her husband as that of her first wife. Now the Supreme Court has ordered the husband to give Rs 12 crore to the second wife. The husband had appealed to the Supreme Court to annul his completely broken marriage under Article 142 of the Constitution. The second wife replied that she should also get permanent alimony equal to that of the first wife.

Supreme Court decision

According to a report in Times of India, Justice B.V. The bench of Justice Nagarathna and Justice Pankaj Mittal expressed displeasure over this demand. He said that the second wife who spends very little time with her husband cannot ask for maintenance equal to that of the first wife. In a detailed 73-page judgment, Justice Nagarathna wrote, “We have serious objection to the practice of treating alimony as a means of equalizing property between husband and wife. Often women mention their husband’s assets, status and income in their applications and then demand an amount equal to their own assets.”

The bench said that the law of maintenance is to protect the wife from poverty, maintain her dignity and provide social justice. According to the law, the wife has the right to live her life in her marital home as before. But, after separation, it cannot be expected that the husband will always maintain her as per his current standard. If the husband has made progress after separation, it would be wrong to always impose the same level of maintenance burden on his ex-wife.

If the husband had gone on the road…

The bench raised the question that if the husband had become poor under unfortunate circumstances after separation, would the wife demand equality in the property? He said that there is no clear formula to decide the maintenance allowance. The second wife does not have the right to demand the same amount as the first wife because the husband’s income at that time has now changed.

In the petition, the second wife said that apart from the permanent alimony of Rs 500 crore, the first wife was also given a house in Virginia, USA. The husband offered permanent maintenance of Rs 20 to 40 lakh to his second wife, saying she spent very little time with him and during this period several cases were registered against her. The Supreme Court has ordered to pay Rs 10 crore to the husband as permanent alimony. Besides, an order has been given to pay an additional Rs 2 crore to vacate the two flats of the woman’s father-in-law in Pune and Bhopal. Apart from this, the husband will also have to pay Rs 30 lakh towards the expenses of the case.