The Bombay High Court has held that a daughter may question the validity of her father’s second marriage in court. In a judgment pronounced on Wednesday, a bench of Justices RD Dhanuka and VG Bisht said this on a petition filed by a 66-year-old woman.
According to the verdict, the woman filed a petition in the family court in 2016 challenging the validity of her late father’s second marriage. In the plea, she stated that her father had remarried after her mother’s death in 2003, but that her father died in 2016. In 2016 she came to know that her father’s second wife was yet to finalize the divorce from her previous marriage. Therefore her father’s second marriage could not be considered valid. The woman said this in her petition.
However, the second wife argued before the Family Court that the petitioner does not have any right in this matter. He said that because there are only two parties to the marriage, that is, husband and wife. Can challenge its validity in court.
HC admitted that the petitioner discovered the truth about the woman’s divorce after the death of her father and knocked on the door of the family court as soon as the discrepancy was detected. Since her father had died, she exposed the discrepancy and challenged the legality of such a marriage.
The bench said that the daughter has the right to question the validity of her father’s marriage. After this, the court sent the petition back to the family court for a fresh decision. The High Court stated, “We cannot conclude from the logic of the Family Court, which wrongly rejected the petition of the appellant.”
