Hindu Succession Act supports daughters but lets down widows and mothers, says Madras High Court

Madras High Court highlights impact of 2005 Hindu Succession Act amendment on daughters' inheritance rights in ancestral property.

The 2005 central amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 gives the daughters a right to equal share as that of the sons in the properties of a deceased coparcener but, in the process, ends up reducing the quantum of property to which the widow and the mother would be entitled to in their capacity as Class I legal heirs, the Madras High Court has highlighted.

Justice N. Seshasayee wrote: “In the din of this euphoria (over giving equal share to daughters) what however, appears to have been overlooked is that other than the daughters, the widow and the mother of the deceased coparcener also figure as Class I female heirs, and the rise in status of daughters as coparceners in effect has reduced the quantum of property which the widow and the mother would get.”

The observations were made while allowing a second appeal filed by two sisters against their father as well as two brothers for having denied equal share to them in their ancestral property. The appellants told the court that their paternal grandfather had died in 1962 and that her father had inherited certain immovable properties by way of a notional partition between his siblings in 1986.

The notional partition deed had divided the properties in to three equal shares between their deceased grandfather, their father and the latter’s brother. The one-third of the properties given in favour of the deceased grandfather were divided further between his two sons and four daughters. Since all four daughters took ₹5,000 each in cash in lieu of their share, the appellant’s father and his brother got those properties too.

In effect, the appellants’ father first got one-third share and then one-eighteenth of the share from the one-third allotted notionally to his deceased father and then half of the shares allotted to his four sisters who had taken money instead of claiming right over the properties.

In 2008, the appellants’ father registered a settlement deed giving away some of those properties to his two sons alone on the ground that those properties must be construed as personal and not ancestral. The appellants’ claim for equal share in those properties, on the basis of the 2005 amendment to the 1956 Act, was rejected by their father forcing them to file a suit for partition.

The appellants’ won the first stage of litigation with the Principal Subordinate Court in Coimbatore ruling in favour of them in 2012 by holding that they would be entitled to equal share in the property. However, on appeal by their father and brothers, an Additional District Court reversed the Sub Court’s decree in 2022 forcing the two daughters to move the present second appeal.