New Delhi, Aug. 7: The Supreme Court today sought a response from actresses Dimple Kapadia and Twinkle Khanna on a petition from late actor Rajesh Khanna's former live-in partner Anita Advani that challenges her alleged eviction from Rajesh's Mumbai home.

Anita, who claims to have lived with Rajesh for nine years, had invoked the Domestic Violence Act against his estranged wife Dimple and their daughter Twinkle after being allegedly evicted from Aashirwad. She claims to have been evicted on June 22, 2012, days before Rajesh died on July 18.

Anita had lodged a domestic violence case against Dimple and Twinkle, prompting summons to them from a magistrate in Mumbai.

But Bombay High Court, relying on a 2012 Supreme Court judgment, quashed the case on April 9 this year, prompting Anita to approach the Supreme Court.

In 2012, the apex court had ruled that "the parties must be otherwise qualified to enter into a legal marriage for availing the protection under the (Domestic Violence) Act".

Therefore, the high court ruled, since Rajesh was not legally divorced from Dimple, his relationship with Anita did not qualify as "marriage" or "a relationship in the nature of marriage".

Today, the apex court bench of Chief Justice H.L. Dattu and Justices Arun Misra and Amitava Roy was initially not inclined to entertain the plea.

However, Anita's counsel C.A. Sundaram and Jatin Jhaveri argued that the 2012 apex court judgment had been erroneous. They alleged that Justice Markandey Katju (now retired) had incorporated certain unverified legal positions from Wikipedia to pass the 2012 verdict in a manner contrary to the domestic violence statute.

"Where two people live together in a relationship akin to being spouses, to include a condition that they should be capable of being spouses would be injecting into the statute a condition not found in the statute at all," Sundaram told the court.

"If, indeed, a restricted meaning of the expression 'a relationship in the nature of marriage' was envisaged, the statute itself would have provided for it."

Sundaram argued that since Rajesh and Dimple had been estranged for more than two decades, their situation should for all practical purposes be construed as a divorce. The couple had married in 1973 and separated in 1984.

Anita's petition had contended that if she and Rajesh had indeed been "capable of entering into a valid marriage", they would have married and "not continue(d) to live as live-in partners".