Ahmedabad: An elderly couple has approached the Gujarat high court against a lower court’s order to hand over the custody of their granddaughter to her mother. The objection is on the grounds that the child’s mother is HIV+ and has contracted another marriage after the death of the child’s father.
According to the case details, the petitioners’ son married the woman in 2015, and a daughter was born to the couple a year later in Barmer district in Rajasthan.
The child’s father died of AIDS in Aug 2023, and after a couple of months, his widow sought custody of the child by filing an application under the provisions of Section 97 of the CrPC at the Deesa taluka court in Banaskantha. The woman has been living in Deesa since she was allegedly ousted from her matrimonial home.
She claimed that while she was forced to leave her home, her in-laws did not allow her to even meet her daughter. She termed the paternal grandparents’ custody of her daughter against her wish as illegal.
In response, the child’s grandparents opposed the daughter-in-law’s application by alleging that she eloped with another person and contracted a marriage with him.
They claimed that the woman is HIV positive, and they fear sending the eight-year-old child to a stepfather.
The court, however, did not accept their contentions and noted in its order that the child appeared to have been influenced by the grandparents against her mother.
The grandparents did not heed the mother’s repeated request to hand over the child’s custody to her, and therefore the court believes that they had illegally detained the child.
The grandparents unsuccessfully challenged the order to return the child to her mother before a Deesa sessions court.
They later filed a petition in the HC, which asked their counsel to come up with judgments favouring their case and scheduled the hearing for Jan 23.