The Madras High Court Bench here has come across a pitiable case of a girl child, brought up by her maternal grandmother, not having been able to receive any maintenance amount from her father for the last 10 years since he blatantly denied paternity and the girl’s mother also showed no interest in supporting her daughter’s claim.
Dismissing a criminal revision case pending in the court since 2011, Justice S. Vimala pointed out that it was in 2004 that the girl, then a minor represented by her grandmother, had approached Padmanabhapuram Judicial Magistrate in Kanyakumari district seeking a direction to her father to pay her a maintenance amount of Rs.3,000 a month.
Contesting the claim, her father contended that he had been made a party to the maintenance case owing to mistaken identity and denied having ever married the girl’s biological mother.
To make things worse, the girl’s mother chose to stay away from the proceedings since she had remarried after her break-up with the girl’s father and had become part of a separate family.
The girl’s father, known with an alias, utilised the two names used to refer to him to claim that he was not the father. However, the Magistrate, on November 18, 2010, rejected his contention on the basis of material records such as wedding invitation and the girl’s birth certificate and directed him to pay Rs.2,000 every month to the girl leading to the present revision.
Ingenious method
Shocked over the ingenious method adopted by the girl’s father to avoid payment of maintenance, Ms. Justice Vimala quoted William Shakespeare’s famous lines ‘What’s in a name?
That which we call a rose by another name would smell as sweet,’ and said: “But this is a case where the name has been a tool in the hands of the revision petitioner to drag this case up to the High Court.”
