In a strongly worded judgment, the Calcutta High Court has flayed a trial court’s ex parte dismissal of a divorce petition filed by a husband on grounds of cruelty and desertion, calling the lower court’s decision “tangential” and lacking engagement with the evidence on record.
The division bench comprising Justice Sabyasachi Bhattacharya and Justice Uday Kumar, while passing its order on May 22, 2025, observed that the trial court had “overlooked” critical facts, including the failure of the wife to adduce any evidence or cross-examine the petitioner-husband despite having filed a written statement in the case.
The High Court noted that the trial court’s impugned judgment “proceeded entirely on a tangential perception of [the judge’s] own, without adverting at all to the materials on record.” The original divorce suit had been filed in 2015, and an ex parte decree was issued by the trial court in February 2018.
In its ruling, the High Court granted the decree of divorce in favour of the husband, holding that sufficient material had been placed on record to substantiate his allegations.
Significantly, the bench issued a cautionary note to the trial court judge, stating, “We are just stopping short of making any serious adverse comment against the learned trial court judge, merely because such a comment could have an adverse effect on the judge’s service career.”
The bench also issued a stern warning regarding the practice of reproducing portions of past judgments without considering the unique facts of the case at hand. “The learned trial judge concerned shall, in future, be aware of copy-pasting his previous judgments and going on his tangential curve of wishful imagination,” the court said.
The judges concluded with a caution that any recurrence of such conduct “may be directed to enter into his service book.”
