A husband and his mother asked the Kerala High Court to shut down a domestic violence complaint on the ground that the wife had waited years before approaching a magistrate. Justice Jobin Sebastian turned them down on 10 September 2026, holding that the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act sets no deadline for filing such a complaint, and that delay by itself is not a ground to quash proceedings already pending before a trial court.
The wife had filed her complaint under Section 12 of the Act before the Judicial First Class Magistrate Court-III, Thrissur, registered as M.C. No. 32/2025. The husband and mother-in-law moved the High Court under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the provision that now carries the quashing jurisdiction once exercised under Section 482 of the old Code of Criminal Procedure, seeking to have the proceedings thrown out at the threshold.
Their case rested on two limbs. First, they said the wife had let roughly six years pass after the parties separated before lodging her complaint, and that such a long, unexplained gap should be fatal to the proceedings. Second, they argued the complaint was retaliatory, pointing out that it came only after the husband had moved the Family Court for compensation in connection with an earlier POCSO case. The wife disputed the delay figure and pointed to a specific allegation of violence as recent as May 2025, which she said the petitioners' framing of the timeline ignored.
On the delay argument, the court went to the statute itself. It found that the PWDV Act contains no provision prescribing any period within which a Section 12 application must be filed, unlike offences carrying their own limitation clauses elsewhere in the criminal law. Where the complaint also points to conduct occurring well within any reasonable timeframe, as the May 2025 allegation did here, the absence of a statutory limitation period leaves delay as, at most, a factor going to credibility rather than a bar to the proceedings themselves.
On the retaliation argument, the court was equally unpersuaded that timing alone proved motive. It held that a domestic violence complaint filed after a husband initiates his own proceedings elsewhere does not, without more, establish that the wife's complaint is retaliatory or malicious. Sequence is not proof of intent. Whether the complaint was in fact filed to counter the husband's Family Court case, or was a genuine grievance that happened to surface around the same time, is exactly the kind of factual question a trial court is equipped to examine through evidence, not something a High Court can resolve on affidavits at the quashing stage.
The judgment also set out why the High Court declined to go further into the rival versions of fact. Relying on the framework the Supreme Court laid down on the limits of quashing jurisdiction in matrimonial matters, the court reiterated that disputed questions of fact and bare assertions that a complaint is false do not, on their own, justify interference under the inherent power to quash. A High Court exercising that power is not meant to conduct what the order described as a mini-trial, weighing one party's version against the other's before any evidence has been led. That function belongs to the magistrate hearing the complaint.
With both limbs of the petitioners' case rejected, the High Court dismissed the quashing petition and left the domestic violence proceedings before the Thrissur magistrate to continue on their own footing. The husband and mother-in-law remain free to raise the delay and the alleged retaliatory motive as part of their defence once the complaint is heard on evidence; what they could not do was use those arguments to stop the complaint from being heard at all.
The ruling gives trial courts and practitioners a clear marker for a recurring tactic in matrimonial litigation, where a respondent facing a domestic violence complaint filed years into a separation argues that the gap itself should end the case before it starts. Kerala's order confirms that the PWDV Act's silence on limitation was a deliberate legislative choice, not an oversight for courts to fill in through quashing orders, and that arguments about delay and motive have their proper place at trial, not at the gatekeeping stage.