NEW DELHI: Supreme Court on Friday took exception to the trend of ‘grant stay and forget listing the case for hearing’ in high courts and said this caused immense hardship to litigants, especially in disputes relating to matrimony and child custody.
“This is a sad state of affairs in the judiciary. This pricks our conscience,” a bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan said while reviving the 2019 order of a single judge of Allahabad HC asking the Bulandshahr district judge to inquire into the suitability of an estranged wife’s home for a child’s upbringing.
Ezaz Ahmed married Nazish Parveen in February 2011, and they had a son in Jan 2013. The woman alleged that she was thrown out of her matrimonial home in 2018 over dowry demands and barred from meeting her son. She moved a habeas corpus petition in Allahabad HC demanding custody of her five-year-old child.
The single judge of the HC, referring to Muslim personal law, said the mother was entitled to custody of her male child till the age of seven and girl child till she attained puberty. The judge directed the Bulandshahr district judge to inquire in which parent’s custody the child’s welfare would be best met. The husband appealed against this order before a division bench of the HC, which stayed the single judge’s order on Oct 18, 2019. However, on Nov 5 this year, a division bench of the HC vacated the stay it had granted more than five years ago, during which the child has become nearly 12 years old.
Frowning at the casual manner in which the stay was granted and its vacation after five years, Justices Kant and Bhuyan said, “It is unfortunate that the division bench entertained the appeal, which should have been thrown out at the threshold.”
Ordering revival of the single judge’s 2019 order, the bench said, “We hope the cause of action of the mother still survives. The boy has been with the father for the last five years and he would have been tutored completely by now.” It asked the Bulandshahr district judge to inquire and submit a report in three weeks.