Nandan Singh Manral vs State and Others

Shiv Narayan Dhingra, J.—This petition u/s 482 Code of Criminal Procedure has been preferred by the Petitioner seeking quashing of order dated 5th November, 2009 by which notice/process has been issued against the Petitioner in complaint case bearing CC a No. V-328/09 pending in the Court of learned Metropolitan Magistrate, Delhi u/s 12 of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (hereinafter referred to as the said Act).

The present Petitioner is brother in law of the husband of wife i.e. he is husband of sister''s husband (behnoi) and was living at Bareili, Uttar Pradesh whereas the wife was living with her husband at Ram Nagar, Uttrakhand.

She made a complaint at Delhi u/s 12 of the said Act making the Petitioner herein as a Respondent. Under the said Act only those persons can be arrayed as Respondents who had a shared household at the time of incident with the aggrieved person. The ''Respondent'' is defined in Section 2(q) of the said Act and it is mandatory u/s 2(q) that in order to be a Respondent, the person must have domestic relationship with the aggrieved person. The domestic relationship as defined u/s 2(f) of the said Act provides that a relationship between two persons is called domestic relationship if the two persons have lived at any point of time in a shared household. The share household has been defined in Section 2(s) which reads as under:

(s) "shared household" means a household where the person aggrieved lives or at any stage has lived in a domestic relationship either singly or alongwith the Respondent and includes such a household whether owned or tenanted either jointly by the aggrieved person and the Respondent or owned or tenanted by either of them respect of which either the aggrieved person or the Respondent or both jointly or singly have a right, title, interest or equity and includes such a household which may belong to the joint family of which the Respondent is a member, irrespective of whether the Respondent or the aggrieved person has a right, title or interest in the shared household;?

It is apparent that the husband of married sister who lived far away from the family of the husband can under no stretch of imagination be said to have lived in shared household with the aggrieved person i.e. wife.

I, therefore, consider that the Petitioner could not be made a Respondent in an application u/s 12 of the said Act. The learned trial Court seems to have, without looking into provisions of the Act, summoned everybody arrayed as Respondent in the application without even caring whether any domestic relationship existed between the aggrieved person and Respondent. F,n the result, the petition is allowed and order dated 5th November, 2009 by which notice/process has been issued against the Petitioner in complaint case bearing CC No. V-328/09 pending in the Court of learned Metropolitan Magistrate, Delhi u/s 12 of Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act qua Petitioner is hereby quashed.

The petition stands allowed.