Cuttack, May 16: Orissa High Court has ruled that an act that “merely wounds the feelings without injury to body” cannot be labelled as “cruelty”.

The ruling was given while considering a woman’s petition, challenging a family court order that had allowed her husband’s plea for dissolution of marriage on grounds of cruelty.

The high court said: “Mere austerity of temper, petulance of manners, rudeness of language, want of civil attention and accommodation or even occasional sallies of passion will not amount to legal cruelty.”

Vikrant Parida, a human resource executive in a private company in Bhubaneswar, was married to Sonali Samal on December 5, 2007. On October 21, 2009, Samal had left her husband’s home with her child of 31 days. Parida, as well as his parents, made several attempts to bring her back but she refused.

The purported charge of cruelty was based on the allegations that during the couple’s honeymoon trip to Thailand, the wife had remained busy on the telephone. After coming back from the trip, she used to get up at 9am and ask for breakfast when her husband was leaving for office. Samal also used to refuse food prepared by the cook as she found it unfit for consumption. Her husband had also accused her of spending most of the time in the bathroom and remaining busy on the telephone. She often slept in the bathroom, Parida had complained. 

The charges against Samal also included misbehaviour. Parida had in the petition alleged that his wife charged him with impotency and humiliated him in front of his friends and relatives for being a “lowly paid company servant”. Samal was also charged with visiting her parents every week without seeking the permission of the husband or her in-laws.

Examining the allegations, the high court, however, held that “by no stretch of imagination the case falls within the ambit of cruelty.”

“Those acts, which affect life, health or even the comfort of the party aggrieved and give a reasonable apprehension of bodily hurt, are called cruelty. What merely wounds the feelings is seldom admitted to be cruelty unless the act is accompanied with bodily injury, either actual or menaced,” the division bench of Justice Vinod Prasad and Justice Biswanath Rath ruled.

“Position of law is very clear to the effect that the married life should be reviewed as a whole and a few isolated instances at the very early start of married life that too over a period of one-and-a-half years should not be snapped especially when the spouses have been blessed with a child and such frivolities of life cannot amount to cruelty,” the bench observed in its order last month, a copy of the text of which is in possession of `The Telegraph.

While setting aside the family court’s order, the high court directed the husband “to embrace the wife and his child in his fold of family relationship and maintain them as they are entitled to”.

The family court had allowed divorce subject to payment of Rs 6 lakh permanent alimony by the husband to the wife and Rs 1 lakh to her for the maintenance and education of her child.

The high court held that the family court had arrived at a wrong decision of granting divorce as it “miserably failed” in appreciating the legal aspect of cruelty. 

“Public interest demands not only that the married status should, whenever as far as and as long as possible should be maintained in the particular facts of the case taking into account the length of cruelty alleged,” the order said.