Disha Kapoor v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Others · 2025 INSC 649

A matrimonial conflict with a criminal complaint

The wife sought to restore a criminal proceeding which the Allahabad High Court had quashed after her application under Section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 led to a complaint case against her husband and members of his family. The Supreme Court had to assess whether the allegations of cruelty, hurt, intimidation and unlawful dowry demand could survive when the complainant's different accounts of the marriage and alleged incidents were compared, while a separate family appeal remained pending.

This case did not arise from a criminal complaint against every person who had participated in the marriage, nor did it involve a final trial on the alleged offences. The application named ten people from the husband's family, the Magistrate issued summons only to the husband and his parents, and the High Court later quashed the proceedings against those three respondents, leaving the complainant to challenge that intervention before the Supreme Court.

The changing account of life in the matrimonial home

The parties agreed that the marriage had taken place in December 2019, although the wife said her treatment changed after the death of the husband's grandfather. Her narrative attributed mental and physical harassment to the husband, his parents and members of the wider family, with a claimed beating and expulsion from the matrimonial home in September 2020 followed by a return in October which she said ended in further mistreatment.

She alleged another attempt to visit the home with her mother in December 2021, when relatives were said to have insulted and threatened them while demanding fifty lakh rupees and a Fortuner vehicle before cohabitation could resume. These were allegations in the complaint rather than facts established by the Supreme Court, which examined how their presentation changed between the application and the complainant's recorded statement instead of deciding the underlying matrimonial dispute as a trial court.

The application described a threat said to have been made by an influential uncle about another uncle shooting the wife, yet the judgment observed that the person identified as the prospective shooter was not one of the accused. That detail mattered because the scope of the criminal process depended on allegations attributable to the particular respondents, rather than on a general description of a large family conflict or the prominence of some of its members.

How the family litigation entered the record

The husband had applied to the Family Court for annulment under Section 12 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, while the wife sought restitution of conjugal rights under Section 9. A common judgment allowed the husband's petition and dismissed the wife's, but an appeal against that decision was said to be pending when the criminal matter came before the Supreme Court.

The Court expressly declined an invitation to examine the factual merits of the Family Court proceeding because doing so could affect the unresolved appeal. Its decision thus did not decide whether the annulment was correct, determine the merits of restitution, or convert a result in the family case into an automatic answer to the criminal complaint.

Nevertheless, the wife's affidavit filed in the family case contained statements which the Court regarded as relevant to the consistency of the criminal account. It described the early relationship as cordial and referred to money given by the husband in late October 2020 for festival purchases, including an expensive saree, although the criminal account placed an expulsion and an unsuccessful attempt to return before that festive period.

The affidavit also spoke of counselling and medication for anxiety without equating that treatment with mental illness, an important distinction because the Court used the material to reconstruct the relationship's deterioration rather than to make a medical finding against the complainant. The wife's restitution petition was another part of the chronology considered alongside her allegations, not a rule that a person who seeks to resume cohabitation cannot have experienced harassment.

Why the criminal versions mattered independently

The Magistrate had compared the initiating complaint with statements recorded under Sections 200 and 202 of the Code of Criminal Procedure before restricting the summons to three of the ten named people. That screening did not eliminate the need to examine the remaining allegations, since the High Court's later use of Section 482 concerned whether proceedings against the husband and parents could properly continue on the material actually presented.

In the application, a later episode of abuse and demand was attributed to several family members, whereas the statement under Section 200 identified a cousin as the person who demanded the money and vehicle. The recorded statement also omitted the asserted September expulsion, an episode significant to the earlier account, so the Court considered the differences substantive rather than treating every version as a harmless change of wording.

The wife said that a beating had fractured her hand, but the Court found no treatment record supporting that alleged injury and described the claims of violence and torture as insufficiently specific on this record. It also found no record of a proper written complaint to the Women Commission despite the wife saying that information had been supplied, considering these gaps together with the contradictions rather than pronouncing that any one missing document always defeats a criminal case.

Two reports to the police formed part of the wife's explanation for reaching the Magistrate, one having been withdrawn according to her because of pressure and another producing no response. The Court did not turn the existence of those reports into a finding that the alleged demand had occurred, while its discussion of the later application focused on the words used to identify the alleged participants and incidents. This separation matters because a step taken to initiate a complaint and proof sufficient to sustain process against named people are different matters in the sequence recorded by the judgment.

The limited outcome of the Supreme Court challenge

An attempted settlement before the Supreme Court did not succeed, after which the Court decided the Special Leave Petition on its merits. It held that the complainant's contrary positions and the inconsistencies between her complaint and statement made these particular criminal proceedings an abuse of process, so the High Court's exercise of its Section 482 power did not warrant interference.

The dismissal left the High Court's quashing order intact, but the judgment's significance lies in the disciplined comparison of distinct records rather than in a proposition that matrimonial proceedings displace criminal law. Because the pending family appeal was expressly kept outside the decision, the criminal outcome cannot fairly be presented as an adjudication of every dispute arising from the marriage, and the reasons must be read in the setting of the three respondents actually summoned.