Woman is the Sole Owner of Stridhan, Her Father Cannot Claim its Recovery From In-Laws: Supreme Court

On August 29, 2024 (Thursday), the Supreme Court (SC) of India held that the woman is the sole owner of stridhan (gifts and ornaments given at the time of marriage), her exclusive property. It added that after a divorce, her father cannot claim recovery of stridhan from her in-laws without any express authorization from her. The bench of Justice JK Maheshwari and Justice Sanjay Karol, in its judgment, said, “...the jurisprudence as has been developed by this Court is unequivocal with respect to the singular right of the female (wife or former wife) as the case may be, being the sole owner of ‘stridhan’. It has been held that a husband has no right, and it has to then be necessarily concluded that a father too, has no right when the daughter is alive, well, and entirely capable of making decisions such as pursuing the cause of the recovery of her stridhan.” After 16 years of marriage, the complainant’s daughter secured divorce by mutual consent in 2016 in a court in the USA by settling all financial and material issues. In 2018, she got remarried in the USA.

In this case, the complainant (father) filed the complaint against his daughter’s former in-laws accusing them of withholding her stridhan. Despite the settlement of all material issues at the time of divorce, the father filed the FIR in 2021 alleging that the in-laws had not returned the stridhan. Further, a charge sheet was filed for offence under Section 406 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 6 of the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. Initially, the matter was heard by the Telangana High Court, former in-laws approached the HC to quash the proceedings. The HC declined to quash the FIR finding the allegations in the charge sheet to be prima facie triable. Thus, the accused filed the present appeal before the top court. The bench considered the short point, “whether the father i.e., the complainant herein, had any locus to file the First Information Report which has led to the present proceedings keeping in view that the same was affected by delay and laches, thereby expressly being non-maintainable? Contingent to the answer to this question would be, whether the High Court was correct in refusing to exercise its inherent power in quashing the proceedings under the Cr.P.C.”

During the proceedings, the SC bench focused on the established legal principle that ‘stridhan’ is the exclusive property of the woman and considered its judgment in various existing cases that affirmed the fact that a woman has absolute ownership over her ‘stridhan’ and no one can claim rights over it. After hearing the matter, the SC bench quashed the FIR filed by the father of a divorced woman seeking stridhan from her former in-laws. The bench said “We find that the law provides for a situation where a woman may, in law, grant a person of her choosing the authority to do any act which she may herself execute. Section 5 of the Power of Attorney Act, 1882, provides as under:- ‘5. Power-of-attorney of married women.—A married woman, of full age, shall, by virtue of this Act, have power, as if she were unmarried, by a non-testamentary instrument, to appoint an attorney on her behalf, for the purpose of executing any non-testamentary instrument or doing any other act which she might herself execute or do; and the provisions of this Act, relating to instruments creating powers-of-attorney shall apply thereto. This section applies only to instruments executed after this Act comes into force.’ It cannot be disputed that no such power of attorney, within the meaning of this Act, stood executed by the complainant’s daughter, in favor of her father, respondent No.2.”

Moreover, the top court said that the law should be used to bring justice rather than get revenge or seek a vendetta against a person. The judgment authored by Justice Karol reads, “We may further observe that the object of criminal proceedings is to bring a wrongdoer to justice, and it is not a means to get revenge or seek a vendetta against persons with whom the complainant may have a grudge. The principle in law that delay in filing the FIR has to be satisfactorily explained and does not need any reiteration. In the present case, the record is entirely silent on that aspect. It is also to be noted, in the FIR the authorities are requested to take action against the appellant for not returning the gifts given by the complainant to his daughter at the time of the marriage, however, in the charge sheet such a complaint turns into a demand of dowry and being pressured into incurring expenses for marriage related functions. The question that is to be answered is that when the point of genesis is separate and distinct, how does the end result turn into something that is entirely foreign to the point of genesis?” Lastly, the SC said, “We…hold that the charge under Section 6 of the Dowry Prohibition Act, is not made out and therefore, fails. Consequently, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the proceedings initiated by the complainant against the present appellants have to be quashed and set aside.”