NEW DELHI: For a rich man, both marriage and divorce are costly affairs. An India-born American citizen, running a successful IT consultancy service in the US, realised this as he had to cough up Rs 500 crore as alimony to his first wife in Nov 2020 and has now been ordered by SC to pay Rs 12 crore to his second wife, with whom his marriage lasted less than a year.
Responding to the husband’s plea to the SC to annul the “irretrievably broken” marriage, which lasted only for a few months after they tied the knot on July 31, 2021, the second wife said she should get a permanent alimony on par with the divorced first wife.
A bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and Pankaj Mithal frowned at the woman’s demand for parity with the first wife, who had spent several years in matrimony with the man, in terms of alimony and her attempt to seek equalisation of her wealth with that of her husband.
Writing a detailed 73-page judgment , Justice Nagarathna said, “We have serious reservations with the tendency of parties seeking maintenance or alimony as an equalisation of wealth with the other party. It is often seen that parties highlight the assets, status and income of their spouse, and then ask for an amount that can equal their wealth to that of the spouse.” She asked why such demands were conspicuously absent when the spouse’s wealth decreased substantially after separation.
The bench said the law of maintenance was to save the estranged wife from destitution, maintain her dignity and deliver social justice. “As per settled law, the wife is entitled to be maintained as far as possible in a manner similar to what she was accustomed to in her matrimonial home while the parties were together,” it said.
“But once the parties have separated, it cannot be expected of the husband to maintain her as per his present status all his life. If the husband is fortunately doing better in life post his separation, then to ask him to always maintain the status of the wife as per his own changing status would be putting a burden on his own personal progress,” the bench said.
“We wonder, would the wife be willing to seek an equalisation of wealth with the husband if due to some unfortunate events post-separation, he has been rendered a pauper,” the bench asked.