New Delhi: In a historic verdict against the maltreatment of ‘bahu’, the Supreme Court on Thursday said that the daughter-in-law has the right to live in her husband’s parents’ house under the Domestic Violence Act. The top court also observed that the wife gets ‘shared household’ of the joint family
The three-judge bench headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan said that by definition in Section 2(s) of the Domestic Violence Act, a ‘shared household’ means that the wife of domestic violence has the legal right in the shared property of the family and also in the ancestral house of her mother-in-law.
The new order reverses the previous verdict made in the SC in 2005 which had observed that the wife was entitled to a shared household only where the person aggrieved lives or at any stage had lived in a domestic relationship.