Widows have pre-existing rights in property: SC

NEW DELHI, July 16: In a significant judgment, the Supreme Court has held that the right to maintenance of a Hindu female flows from the ...

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NEW DELHI, July 16: In a significant judgment, the Supreme Court has held that the right to maintenance of a Hindu female flows from the social and temporal relationship between the husband and the wife and that right in the case of a widow is a “pre-existing right”.

“This pre-existing right of a Hindu widow was enshrined in the shastric Hindu law long before the passing of the Hindu women’s rights to Property Act, 1937 and the Hindu married women’s right to Separate Maintenance and Residence Act, 1946. The two Acts merely recognised the position as was existing under the shastric Hindu law and gave it a `statutory backing’, the court observed. The ruling was handed down by a division bench comprising Justice A S Anand and Justice V N Khare while allowing an court appeal.

The appeal arose out of a property dispute between a son, his widow mother on one hand and other family members of the deceased father on the other, who had willed his properties, including agricultural land in their favour.

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Thecourt said that the obligations, under the shastric Hindu law, to maintain a Hindu widow out of the properties of her deceased husband received a statutory recognition with the 1937 Act coming into force. The law on the subject was, thereafter consolidated and codified by the 1946 Act which came into force on April 23, 1946. The right to maintenance of the Hindu widow, as a pre-existing right, was thus recognised by the two statutes referred to above but it was not created for the first time by any of those statutes. Her right to maintenance existed under the shastric Hindu law long before statutory enactment came into force, the court added.

The Hindu Success Act, 1956, the court noted, made far reaching changes in the structure of the Hindu law by removing the traditional limitations on the powers of a Hindu widow to deal with the property of her deceased husband, in her possession in lieu of her right to maintenance and the Act made her an absolute owner of the property, over which hithertofore she hadonly a limited right.

“It is by force of Section 14 (10) of the Hindu Succession Act that the widow’s limited interest gets automatically enlarged into an absolute right notwithstanding any restriction placed under a document an instrument.

So far as sub-section (2) of Section 14 is concerned, it applies to instruments, decrees, awards, gifts, etc, which create an independent or a new title in favour of the female for the first time. It has no application to cases where the instrument or the document either declares or recognises or confirms her share in the property or her `pre-existing right to maintenance’ out of that property,” the Supreme Court observed.