Refusal by wife to make tea no provocation for assault, rules Bombay HC

Refusal by wife to make tea no provocation for assault, rules Bombay HC

Mumbai:25.02.2021 

Upholding a 2016 conviction of a man for culpable homicide not amounting to murder in a Pandharpur case, the Bombay high court said his wife refusing to make tea for him, “by no stretch of imagination, can be said to have offered grave and sudden provocation for the appellant to assault her, much less, such a brutal assault.”

On the fateful day, “on being refused tea”, the man assaulted his wife with a hammer. In 2016, a trial court in Pandharpur sentenced him to 10 years’ imprisonment for having knowledge that his act could cause her death. He appealed from jail. Justice Revati Mohite Dere found no merit in his appeal against conviction. She said instead, “It would not be out of place to observe that a wife is not a chattel or an object. Marriage ideally is a partnership based on equality. More often than not, it is far from that. Cases such as these are not uncommon. Such cases reflect the imbalance of gender— skewed patriarchy, the socio-cultural milieu one has grown up in, which often seeps into a marital relationship.”

The HC said, “This medieval notion of the wife being the property of the husband to do as he wishes, unfortunately, still persists in the majority mindset. Nothing but notions of patriarchy.” TNN