Naresh Kumar retired as an Additional District and Sessions Judge, and like every retired judicial officer his pension was revised upward once the Second National Judicial Pay Commission's recommendations came into effect, with arrears paid out on top of the revised monthly figure. When his wife went back to the Family Court seeking an increase in her maintenance under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Family Court raised her monthly maintenance from Rs 9,000 to Rs 18,000. Kumar challenged that enhancement in a criminal revision before the Allahabad High Court, and it is there that the pension revision became the central issue.
Before the Family Court, Kumar had represented his pension as a fixed figure of Rs 25,632 a month, the amount at which it was originally set. He did not disclose that the pay commission's recommendations had since revised that figure upward, nor did he mention the arrears that followed from the revision. The wife's side pointed to this in the enhancement proceedings, and by the time the matter reached the High Court, Kumar himself did not dispute that he had in fact been receiving close to Rs 88,000 a month after the revision took effect, a figure several times what he had put before the Family Court.
Justice Lakshmi Kant Shukla treated that gap as decisive. The judgment records that Kumar had concealed from the Family Court both the pension revision following the pay commission's recommendations and the arrears he received as a result, and finds no legal or jurisdictional error in the Family Court's order that would justify the High Court interfering with it. A litigant seeking to resist or minimise a maintenance obligation cannot do so by presenting an income figure he knows to be outdated while the true, substantially higher figure sits undisclosed.
Kumar raised a second defence that fared no better. He pointed to his second marriage and his resulting obligation to support a second wife and children, arguing that this competing responsibility should temper what he owed his first wife under the enhanced order. The Court rejected this as a ground to reduce maintenance, treating a self-created second domestic obligation as no answer to a pre-existing maintenance liability that a man cannot simply dilute by remarrying and acquiring new dependents.
What gives the ruling its sharper edge is the Court's framing of who was before it. The judgment observes that Kumar was not a simple litigant in an ordinary family dispute, a pointed remark given his own background on the bench, and adds that a judge is always a judge, a line aimed at the expectation that someone who spent a career applying these very provisions to other litigants should not be the one found concealing income from a court. The rebuke reads less as incidental colour and more as the Court marking that judicial background raises rather than lowers the standard of candour expected in such proceedings.
For maintenance litigation generally, the order reinforces two points that come up repeatedly in Section 125 proceedings. An income figure that was accurate when a maintenance order was first passed does not stay accurate forever, and a paying spouse who knows of a subsequent increase, whether from a pay revision, a promotion or any other source, carries a real risk if that increase is left out of the record when enhancement is sought. Equally, a second marriage and its attendant obligations will not by itself persuade a court to scale back maintenance owed under an earlier marriage, since the law treats the first obligation as continuing rather than displaced by a later one voluntarily undertaken.
The revision also illustrates how little room a High Court leaves itself to interfere once a Family Court's factual finding of concealment is on record. Kumar's counsel did not, on the reports available, seriously dispute the figures once pressed; the argument instead rested on whether the second marriage ought to count as a mitigating circumstance and on whether the enhancement itself was proportionate. Both threads failed because the Court treated the concealment finding as foreclosing any sympathetic reading of the rest of the record, leaving Kumar's remaining arguments with little independent force once that threshold issue went against him.