A Family Court in Kanpur Nagar, by an order dated 19 March 2025, directed a husband to pay his wife Rs 20,000 a month and their minor son Rs 10,000 a month under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Resisting the claim, the husband had argued before the Family Court that his wife was in an adulterous relationship with a specific, named man, and that this disentitled her to maintenance. He relied on photographs to make the case.
The Family Court was not satisfied. It found that the husband had not established where the photographs came from, how they had been created, or that they were authentic, and on that basis it rejected the adultery defence and granted maintenance to both wife and son. The husband then filed a criminal revision before the Allahabad High Court, challenging that order.
Justice Lakshmi Kant Shukla agreed with the Family Court on the photographs. Nothing in the record established their provenance or authenticity, and a court cannot treat unverified images as proof of an extramarital relationship serious enough to defeat a maintenance claim. The revision was dismissed and the maintenance order allowed to stand, a straightforward application of the ordinary evidentiary standard the Family Court had already applied correctly.
The judgment did not stop there. Justice Shukla used the case to flag a structural gap that the dispute had exposed. Where a wife's maintenance claim is resisted on the ground that she is in a relationship with a specific, named, identifiable man, and the husband seeks a finding against her on that basis, the man himself has no formal route under Section 125 to appear and answer the allegation before a court records any adverse finding touching him. The provision simply contains no mechanism for his impleadment or for serving him notice.
That silence, the court reasoned, sits uneasily with natural justice and with the protection Article 21 extends to reputation. A finding that a named individual carried on an adulterous relationship is capable of damaging that person's standing well beyond the four corners of a maintenance dispute between two other people, and the audi alteram partem principle ordinarily requires that anyone facing such a finding get a chance to be heard before it is recorded. The court was careful to frame the point narrowly: it was not holding that every alleged co-adulterer must be impleaded in every Section 125 proceeding, only that a problem arises specifically where a particular, identifiable person is named and an adverse finding against him is actually sought.
Two possible fixes were put forward for consideration, rather than ordered outright. One option would be framing new procedural rules specifically for notice and impleadment of a named co-adulterer in maintenance proceedings. The other would extend, with suitable modification, the principle already found in Rule 6(a) of the Hindu Marriage and Divorce Rules, 1956, which allows an alleged adulterer to be joined as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings grounded in adultery, to Section 125 proceedings as well.
Rather than attempt to settle the question itself in an individual revision, the court directed the Registrar General to place the matter before the Chief Justice, so that the possibility of framing such rules could be considered at an administrative level, applicable across cases rather than resolved piecemeal each time the issue comes up.
Until that happens, the practical position is unsettled. Husbands raising an adultery defence by naming a specific man will continue to do so without any statutory procedure requiring that man be heard, and judges hearing such claims are left to improvise a fair process case by case, as the Family Court effectively did here by simply declining to act on unproven photographs. For lawyers advising either a wife defending a maintenance claim or a man named in one, the judgment signals that courts are alert to the reputational stakes involved and may expect some form of notice or opportunity to respond even before formal rules exist.