BRAJESWARIAMMA Vs. K MVISWANATH

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is a revision petition which has been filed against the order of the City Magistrate, Bangalore, dismissing the petitioner's application for maintenance against her husband under section 488, Criminal P. C. The respondent though served is absent and unrepresented.

(2.) I think this is a clear case in which the respondent is bound to give maintenance to the petitioner. Admittedly the respondent has been writing letters to the petitioner's brother asking for money. The learned Magistrate has tried to make some distinction between requests for money and demands for the same which is really of no substance where the person asking is a son-in-law of the family who is postponing taking his wife to live with him. In Ex. p-6 the respondent has "cautioned" the petitioner's brothers not to be "beggarly" and "ridiculous" when arranging for nuptials and that if they do not spend "a few hundreds" "the consequences will be very undesirable". In Ex. p-8 he has written a registered letter to his wife that if within 15 days after its receipt her parents and guardians do not come to settlement after satisfying all the conditions of premarriage promises he will be at liberty to marry again after treating the marriage of the petitioner as completely cancelled and he has referred her to some earlier letter in which fie had set out what the terms of the premarriage were. He has not even stated in Court what those promises were and he has admitted in his evidence that "no financial promises were made before marriage".

(3.) Apparently the respondent has not taken the petitioner to live with him as he feels that some pre-nuptial promises between himself and the girl's mother were not fulfilled. If the petitioner's mother had made such promises before the marriage it was for him to have claimed them from her and not made it a pretext for neglecting or refusing to take the petitioner to live with him and to maintain her as his wife. The learned Magistrate appears to have viewed this conduct of the petitioner rather lightly which I am not prepared to do. The respondent has married a second wife thereby ruining the life and prospects of the petitioner, a young girl who has no father. She appears to be a girl of some education and the respondent has made her an innocent victim of some mercenary differences between her mother and himself. He has not even suggested anything against the petitioner or her behaviour and had no complaint at all to make about her. The offer of the respondent to take back the petitioner and live with her appears to me in the circumstances of this caso to be thoroughly wanting in bona fides.