The Gujarat High Court recently ruled that a male teacher forcing a much younger student to marry him would amount to cruelty, entitling the girl student-wife to divorce.
A division bench comprised of Justices NV Anjaria and Sandeep N Bhatt, therefore, upheld a family court’s decision to dissolve the 5-year marriage of a 45-year-old professor who had forced his girl student, who was 12 years younger than him, to marry him.
The bench stated, “Cruelty is not a defined concept. A girl student forced to marry a teacher, both with a large age and prospects gap, and post-marriage treatment meted out to the wife (student) in the current case proves that she was subjected to cruelty.”
The husband was in court challenging an order of a family court in Amreli district that granted the wife divorce on the grounds of cruelty.
According to the facts of the case, the wife was a girl student of the husband, who taught her in college. He made advances and insisted that she get an A in his subject, failing which she would have to act as per his whims.
Aside from that, the professor kept calling her and pleading with her to marry him. He promised her that if she married him, his two children from a previous marriage would get a mother’s love. She claimed he got her signature on some documents that turned out to be a marriage application form.
However, after marrying him, the girl discovered that his first wife was not dead and that his marriage was still going on. She also claimed that her in-laws mocked her and demanded Rs. 5 lakhs from her parents for furniture. She added that her husband and in-laws did not allow her to conceive and that she was forced to abort her pregnancy three times.
The husband, on the other hand, claimed that he paid for the girl’s education and that the marriage was a love marriage rather than a forced marriage. He even argued that the wife didn’t provide much evidence to back up her claims.
After considering the arguments, the bench concluded that in most cases, the facts speak for themselves. It was noted that there was sufficient evidence in the case to prove the facts.
In the case of the wife, she was forced and trapped into contracting marriage. There is no doubt that the husband held a position of dominance and trust both. The wife aged 28 years was the girl student in the Polytechnic College. The husband aged 40 years was the teacher, who used to take the classes where she was also one of the pupils,” the bench noted.
The bench noted that the husband made advances to the wife, who was then his girl student, in order to seek a relationship.
“Repeated incidents of sending messages to the wife were a type of harassment and must be viewed as harassment only when a person positioned as a teacher sends such luring message to the student,” the bench highlighted.
The bench stated that the medical documents placed on record by the husband to show he took proper care of the wife, on the contrary, support the wife’s contention and fortify her case that she was pregnant and abortion was forced on her three times.
As a result, the bench dismissed the appeal and upheld the Family Court’s decision.
