JUDGMENT :

SANDEEP MEHTA, J.

Civil Appeal @ SLP (Civil) No. 25076 of 2024

1. Heard.

2. Leave granted.

3. We are well into the 21st Century, and yet an attempt by a qualified woman to pursue her professional career and to secure a safe and stable environment for the upbringing of her child has been treated as an act of cruelty and desertion by the Courts below. We are constrained to observe that the approach adopted by the learned Family Court, as affirmed by the High Court, is not only legally unsustainable but also deeply disquieting. The endeavour of the appellant to establish her own dental clinic at Ahmedabad, rather than allowing the professional qualification she had earned through years of effort to lie dormant and go waste, has been viewed with disapproval, merely because her stance did not conform to the expectation of the husband and the in-laws that she must abandon her aspirations and reside with her husband at a remote location on account of his posting as an Army Officer.

4. The reasoning which permeates the impugned judgments appears to be founded upon deeply entrenched archaic societal assumptions that a wife’s professional identity is subject to an implied spousal veto