Coming to the rescue of a 37-year-old woman having Indian origin and Canadian citizenship, the High Court of Karnataka has directed the State Home Secretary and the city Police Commissioner to ensure that the custody of her seven-year-old daughter, who is under illegal detention of the woman’s sister in the city, is restored to her along with all relevant documents.
A Division Bench comprising Justice Budihal R.B and Justice K.S. Mudagal issued the directions while allowing a habeas corpus writ petition filed by Manju Malini S., a Canadian citizen who is currently staying in the city.
The court held that the petitioner’s sister, Shalini S., 35, and her husband Vijay T., 41, had detained the child in their custody illegally and were refusing to handover the child to her mother from the past four years.
The petitioner, at the time of of proceedings at a Canadian court regarding her matrimonial discord with her husband, had left the child in the custody of her mother, Latha S., who is living in the city, by executing a deed of authorisation in 2011. After the Canadian court granted the sole custody of the child to the petitioner in 2012 following dissolution of marriage, she executed a power of attorney appointing her mother as the guardian of the child in her absence.
Meanwhile, Ms. Shalini and her husband, who have no child of their own, had convinced Ms. Latha to stay in their house along with the petitioner’s daughter. After some time, the couple had forcibly removed Ms. Latha from their house but had illegally detained the child with them and had refused to handover the child to the petitioner despite repeated requests from the petitioner.
The couple even tried to falsely claim that they had adopted the child besides claiming that the petitioner had no enough resources to look after her daughter who has some medical complication.
However, the court not only found that the couple had kept the child in their custody illegally but also observed from the social media postings and medical records of Mr. Vijay that he had “contemptuous feelings against his own mother, motherland, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and against female. The postings [on social medial] further show that he has indulged in alcohol, pornography and unhealthy sexual acts ...” Mr. Vijay is being treated by a psychiatrist, the court noted from the documents.
“... it is even difficult to imagine about the well-being of the child in his [Mr. Vijay’s] company,” the court observed.
