Daughter can challenge father's second marriage: HC

The Bombay high court has held that a daughter can question in court the validity of her father's second marriage.

In a judgment pronounced on Wednesday, a bench of Justices R D Dhanuka and V G Bisht allowed the plea filed by a 66-year-old woman challenging a family court order that held only parties to a marriage could challenge the validity of the marriage.

As per the judgement, the woman filed a plea in the family court in 2016, challenging the validity of her late father's second marriage.

In the plea, she said her father had remarried after her mother's death in 2003, but it was in 2016, after her father's death, that she realised her father's second wife was yet to finalise her divorce from her previous marriage.

Her father's second marriage, therefore, could not be considered as valid, the woman said in her plea.

The second wife, however, argued before the family court that the petitioner had no locus standi in the matter as only the two parties to a marriage, that is the husband and the wife, could challenge its validity in court.

The HC, however, held that the petitioner discovered the truth about the woman's divorce much after her father's death and that she had approached the family court as soon as she learned of the discrepancy.

Since her father was dead, it was for her to bring the discrepancy forward and challenge the validity of such a marriage, the court said.

The bench said the family court was wrong in holding that the daughter was barred from questioning the validity of her father's marriage. It sent the plea back to the family court to decide afresh.

'We cannot concur with the reasoning and conclusion arrived at by the learned Family Court which wrongly dismissed the appellant's petition,' the HC said.