IMPORTANT POINTS
Section 125 is applicable to Muslim divorced women.
Maintenance cases are required to be disposed of at the earliest.
While determining maintenance, all aspects of financial capability of the husband should be considered.

JUDGMENT

Dipak Misra, J.

Leave granted.

2. When centuries old obstructions are removed, age old shackles are either burnt or lost their force, the chains get rusted, and the human endowments and virtues are not indifferently treated and emphasis is laid on “free identity” and not on “annexed identity”, and the women of today can gracefully and boldly assert their legal rights and refuse to be tied down to the obscurant conservatism, and further determined to ostracize the “principle of commodity”, and the “barter system” to devoutly engage themselves in learning, criticizing and professing certain principles with committed sensibility and participating in all pertinent and concerned issues, there is no warrant or justification or need to pave the innovative multi-avenues which the law does not countenance or give its stamp of approval. Chivalry, a perverse sense of human egotism, and clutching of feudal megalomaniac ideas or for that matter, any kind of condescending attitude have no room. They are bound to be sent to the ancient woods, and in the new horizon people should proclaim their own ideas and authority. They should be able to say that they are the persons of modern age and they have the ideas of today’s “Bharat”. Any other idea floated or any song sung in the invocation of male chauvinism is the proposition of an alien, a total stranger – an outsider. That is the truth in essentiality.

3. The facts which are requisite to be stated for adjudication of these appeals are that the appellant filed an application under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) contending, inter alia, that she married Shahid Khan, the respondent herein, on 26.4.1992 and during her stay at the matrimonial home she was prohibited from talking to others, and the husband not only demanded a car from the family but also started harassing her. A time came when he sent her to the parental home where she was compelled to stay for almost three months. The indifferent husband did not come to take her back to the matrimonial home, but she returned with the fond and firm hope that the bond of wedlock would be sustained and cemented with love and peace but as the misfortune would have it, the demand for the vehicle continued and the harassment was used as a weapon for fulfilment of the demand. In due course she came to learn that the husband had illicit relationship with another woman and he wanted to marry her. Usual to sense of human curiosity and wife’s right when she asked him she was assaulted. The situation gradually worsened and it became unbearable for her to stay at the matrimonial home. At that juncture, she sought help of her parents who came and took her to the parental home at Lucknow where she availed treatment. Being deserted and ill-treated and, in a way, suffering from fear psychosis she took shelter in the house of her parents and when all her hopes got shattered for reunion, she filed an application for grant of maintenance at the rate of Rs.4000/-per month on the foundation that husband was working on the post of Nayak in the Army and getting a salary of Rs.10,000/- approximately apart from other perks.

4. The application for grant of maintenance was resisted with immense vigour by the husband disputing all the averments pertaining to demand of dowry and harassment and further alleging that he had already given divorce to her on 18.6.1997 and has also paid the Mehar to her.

5. A reply was filed to the same by wife asserting that she had neither the knowledge of divorce nor had she received an amount of Mehar.

6. During the proceeding before the learned Family Judge the wife-appellant examined herself and another, and the respondent-husband examined four witnesses, including himself. The learned Family Judge, Family Court, Lucknow while dealing with the application forming the subject matter Criminal Case No. 1120 of 1998 did not accept the primary objection as regards the maintainability under Section 125 CrPC as the applic