INVC NEWS
New Delhi : The Supreme Court of India delivered a significant judgment affirming that a woman is the sole owner of her Stridhan, which includes gold jewelry and other gifts given to her at the time of marriage by her parents. The court ruled that after a divorce, neither the woman’s father nor anyone else has the right to demand these gifts back from her former in-laws.
This ruling arose from a case involving P Veerabhadra Rao, whose daughter got married in December 1999. After 16 years of marriage, she filed for divorce, which was granted by a Missouri court in 2016. Subsequently, she remarried in 2018. However, in 2021, her father filed an FIR against her former in-laws in Hyderabad, seeking the return of her Stridhan.
The woman’s former in-laws challenged this in the Telangana High Court, seeking to quash the FIR, but their plea was dismissed. They then approached the Supreme Court, which upheld the High Court’s decision, dismissing the case against the in-laws. The Supreme Court clarified that a woman’s Stridhan is her exclusive property, and no one else, including her father, has the right to claim it on her behalf, especially when she is alive, healthy, and capable of asserting her rights.
The court also emphasized that criminal proceedings should be used to bring actual wrongdoers to justice, not as a tool for revenge or to settle personal scores. Additionally, the fact that the father initiated legal action more than two decades after the marriage, several years after the divorce, and after his daughter had remarried, further weakened his case.
