When Mrs Pandey left her matrimonial house on July 17, 2017, she sent a legal notice to her husband stating that the marriage had broken down. Thereafter, her husband Mr Pandey filed a court petition for divorce. While the divorce petition was in court, Mrs Pandey caught her husband living with another woman. He even had two children with her. Mrs Pandey discovered this when Mr Pandey was outside the school dropping the children.
When the court heard Mrs Pandey’s statement, the divorce case took a sharp u turn. The Family Court applied Section 23(1)(a) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and stated that Mr Pandey had approached the court with unclean hands and taken advantage of his own wrongdoing. Thus the Family Court did not grant divorce to Mr Pandey and instead imposed Rs 2 lakh cost on him as due to his actions Mrs Pandey had to travel from Banaras to Delhi regularly to attend the court hearings.
