The Supreme Court has held that a husband calling his wife “stupid” and “useless” cannot, by itself, constitute an offence of cruelty or criminal intimidation, cautioning courts against giving a criminal colour to temperamental differences between spouses without specific evidence of harassment or abuse.
However, the Supreme Court noted that the Canadian coroner’s report and the Toronto Police Department’s investigation did not indicate any foul play or signs of a struggle in the apartment. The husband was not present when the woman died, and CCTV footage showed him returning to the apartment nearly half an hour after the incident. It also recorded that the woman had been stressed by her studies and inability to find suitable employment. The court also questioned why no complaint or concrete action had been taken during the marriage despite the alleged dowry demands and harassment.
The court was hearing an appeal by the husband, who challenged the Bombay High Court’s January 2025 order refusing to quash an FIR registered against him on allegations of dowry harassment, cruelty and physical abuse by his wife’s father. The FIR invoked Sections 304B (dowry death), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 498A (cruelty by husband or relatives) and 504 (intentional insult), read with Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code, besides provisions of the Dowry Prohibition Act. The Toronto police closed their investigation in January 2024, while the coroner’s report attributed the death to multiple blunt impact injuries caused by the fall. It noted that the allegations related to 2021 and 2022, but the FIR was lodged only after the woman’s death in June 2023.
Quashing criminal proceedings against a man whose wife died by suicide after jumping from the 22nd floor of their apartment in Toronto, Canada, the court said that a spouse’s short temper or habit of scolding the other over trivial issues cannot automatically be equated with criminal conduct or made the basis for holding the person responsible for the suicide. “The allegation that the appellant used to call the deceased ‘stupid’ and ‘useless,’ even if accepted prima facie, cannot to any extent qualify as an offence of cruelty or criminal intimidation,” said the court, adding that such conduct, at best, reflected on the husband’s temperament. Finding no material to establish the essential ingredients of dowry death, the court said the prosecution had also failed to demonstrate any proximate act of cruelty or harassment that could establish a reasonable nexus between the alleged conduct of the husband and his wife’s suicide.
