MT NUR BIBI Vs. SKALI AHMAD

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is a defendant's appeal arising out of a suit for restitution of conjugal rights. The plaintiff's case was that the defendant No. 1 was his legally wedded wife, that he had come to the house of her father when on the 6feh of June, 1922, her father and brothers forcibly under a threat of injury to his person and life made him sign a document purporting to be a deed of divorce, that accordingly no valid divorce was pronounced by him and that even if there was a divorce it was a revocable one and he revoked it by registered notices on the 17 of June, 1922.

(2.) The contesting defendant No. 1 in her written statement denied that there had been any coercion or compulsion and pleaded that a valid divorce had been pronounced and that it was an irrevocable one.

(3.) The Court of first instance although finding that some moral force might have been used in obtaining the document came to the conclusion that even if it was obtained under compulsion it was valid. It thought that a valid and irrevocable divorce had been pronounced, and accordingly dismissed that suit. On appeal the lower Appellate Court has come to a contrary conclusion. It has found that the defendants Nos. 2 to 5 had prepared a plot to secure a deed of divorce and everything was ready from before, that they took the plaintiff to the house of one Abdul Rahim who appears to be a Bad-mash of Benares, that there were some 5 or 10 men sitting with lathis, and that there the plaintiff was forced to execute the deed of divorce. It found that the plaintiff had been forced to sign the document. As to whether there had bean an oral pronouncement by the plaintiff it came to the conclusion that the story of the defendants was quite false. It believed that the plaintiff did not utter the word of divorce orally. It accordingly decreed the claim.