Eleven Thousand Versus Eighty Thousand: What the Allahabad High Court Teaches Us About Fighting a False Income Claim
This article has been researched and written by Advocate Aarun Chanda, who practices divorce law in Mumbai and Pune. It is intended solely for academic purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. The views expressed are personal. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified lawyer or advocate specializing in divorce cases for professional legal guidance.
A husband once walked into my chamber holding two documents side by side, the way a magician holds two cards before asking you to pick one. In his left hand: his own salary slip, government-stamped, reading eleven thousand rupees a month. In his right hand: his wife’s affidavit before the Family Court, in which his monthly income had somehow inflated itself to eighty thousand rupees in one paragraph and, not to be outdone, to one lakh twenty-five thousand rupees in another. “Sir,” he said, with the wounded dignity of a man who has just discovered his own bank balance has an active imagination, “which of these three men is actually me?”
I told him what I tell most clients who arrive in this particular state of righteous outrage: I believe you, the arithmetic is absurd, and no, we are not filing for the wife’s arrest. That last part usually surprises them more than anything else in the conversation. And it is exactly the confusion that the Allahabad High Court was recently asked to untangle in a case that reads almost like a mirror of the scene in my own office.
1. THE FACTS OF THE CASE
The matter came up before Justice Raj Beer Singh as an appeal under Section 380 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. The background was straightforward and, frankly, depressingly familiar to anyone who practises in this space. The wife had filed an application under Section 125 of the CrPC seeking maintenance, and in her supporting affidavit, she stated her husband’s monthly income as Rs. 80,000. The husband’s case was that his real income was a fraction of that figure — Rs. 11,000 a month — and that his wife had not produced a shred of evidence to support the number she had put on affidavit. Aggrieved, he did not simply contest the maintenance figure before the Family Court; he went further and filed an application under Section 340 of the CrPC, corresponding to Section 379 of the BNSS, asking the Family Court at Prayagraj to initiate perjury proceedings against his wife for making what he characterised as a knowingly false statement on oath.
The Family Court, by its order of the 28th of October, 2025, rejected that application. The husband carried the fight to the High Court. And the High Court, in a judgment that ought to be required reading before any husband reaches for the word “perjury” in a maintenance matter, dismissed his appeal as well.
2. WHY THE HIGH COURT SAID NO
Justice Singh’s reasoning turned on a distinction that experienced practitioners internalise fairly early in their careers but that clients, quite understandably, never quite believe until a judge says it to their face: exaggeration is not automatically perjury, and every inflated claim in an affidavit does not entitle the other side to walk into a criminal complaint.
The Bench was candid about the reality of these proceedings in a manner I found genuinely refreshing. It observed, in terms that will be quoted in Family Courts across the country for years to come, that it is “common knowledge” that in proceedings of this kind, a claimant-wife “generally” exaggerates the husband’s income to strengthen her maintenance claim, but that this tendency, by itself, does not warrant action under Section 340 of the CrPC. The provision, the Court explained, exists as “a safeguard against frivolous and vexatious prosecution,” not as an all-purpose weapon to be deployed the moment one spouse feels the other has stretched the truth. Before a court can even consider directing a complaint for an offence under Section 195(1)(b) of the CrPC — the provision covering offences relating to documents and evidence produced before a court — it must first form an opinion that doing so is “expedient in the interest of justice.” That is a genuinely high threshold, and the Court leaned heavily on the Supreme Court’s decision in Dr. S.P. Kohli v. The High Court of Punjab and Haryana (1978), which had held decades earlier that prosecution for perjury ought to be sanctioned only where the falsehood appears deliberate and conscious, and where a conviction is reasonably probable — not merely possible, but genuinely likely on the material available.
Applying that standard, the Bench made an observation that, to my mind, is the real heart of the judgment: the husband’s actual income was a question of fact still to be decided by the Family Court itself, on the evidence led by both sides, in the very maintenance proceeding that was still pending. Until that determination was made, the Court reasoned, it could not even be said with confidence that the wife’s affidavit was false at all — merely that it was disputed. As the Bench put it, expediency in the interest of justice is not measured by the magnitude of the grievance felt by the aggrieved husband, but by the effect the alleged falsehood has actually had on the administration of justice. Finding no such effect established on the facts before it, the Court held there was no material illegality in the Family Court’s refusal to launch a perjury inquiry, and dismissed the appeal.
3. THE REAL LESSON: YOU ARE FIGHTING THE WRONG BATTLE
I suspect a great many husbands reading a summary of this judgment will feel a flicker of injustice on the appellant’s behalf, and I understand the instinct. But having sat across the table from enough clients in exactly this position, I can say with some confidence that the husband in this case was, tactically speaking, aiming his fire in the wrong direction — and the judgment, read carefully, is less a defeat for husbands than a signpost pointing them toward the remedy that actually works.
Maintenance proceedings are not, and were never designed to be, a forum for punishing exaggeration. They are designed to arrive at a fair figure through evidence, and the entire architecture for doing so was laid down by the Supreme Court in Rajnesh v. Neha (2021) 2 SCC 324. That judgment did something genuinely useful: it acknowledged, in the Court’s own candid words, that maintenance proceedings across the country were being decided “on the basis of some amount of guess work,” because both sides routinely submit scanty and self-serving material — the wife tending to inflate the husband’s means, the husband tending to conceal them. To fix this, the Supreme Court mandated a standardised Affidavit of Disclosure of Assets and Liabilities to be filed by both parties in every maintenance proceeding in the country, and armed the process with real teeth: if a party disputes what the other has declared, they may seek the court’s permission to serve interrogatories and demand production of documents under Order 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure; the court itself may invoke Section 106 of the Evidence Act, since a person’s own income is a fact peculiarly within their own knowledge, and the burden of explaining it shifts accordingly; and courts have been given the latitude to draw an adverse inference against a party who conceals or refuses to produce relevant financial records.
This is the actual battlefield on which a false income claim should be fought — not a side-application accusing the other spouse of a crime, but a sustained, document-heavy contest inside the maintenance proceeding itself. If a wife claims Rs. 80,000 without a shred of supporting material, the correct response is not a perjury complaint; it is to compel her, through interrogatories and document production, to actually substantiate that figure — and to place before the Family Court the husband’s own salary slips, his Income Tax Returns, his Form 16, his bank statements, and if necessary, a summons to his employer, so that the Rs. 11,000 figure is not merely asserted but proved. An unsupported number in an affidavit collapses the moment the other side is made to defend it with paper. A perjury complaint, by contrast, asks a criminal court to punish a state of mind — deliberate, conscious falsehood — that is genuinely difficult to establish while the underlying factual dispute about income is still being tried in a parallel proceeding. Justice Singh’s judgment simply recognised that logical sequencing problem and refused to let the cart be placed before the horse.
4. A NOTE ON PROPORTION
There is also, I think, a quieter wisdom buried in the Allahabad High Court’s reluctance to treat every exaggerated affidavit as a criminal matter, and it has to do with what maintenance litigation is actually for. Section 125 proceedings — now Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita — exist to prevent destitution swiftly, through a summary procedure that was never meant to bear the full weight of a criminal trial bolted onto its side. If every disputed figure in a maintenance affidavit became grounds for a perjury complaint, Family Courts across the country would spend their days adjudicating cross-accusations of deceit rather than the actual question before them: what does this family need, and what can this husband reasonably pay. The Supreme Court’s caution in Dr. S.P. Kohli — that perjury prosecutions must be reserved for genuinely deliberate falsehoods with a real probability of conviction — exists precisely to prevent matrimonial litigation from curdling into an endless cycle of retaliatory criminal complaints, each one a fresh proceeding layered atop a marriage that has usually already broken down for entirely different reasons.
5. A CLOSING THOUGHT
What I take from this judgment, ultimately, is a reminder of something the rule of law insists upon rather more often than we give it credit for: that the correct remedy matters as much as the correct grievance. The husband in this case had, on the face of it, a perfectly legitimate complaint — a wide gap between a claimed income and a documented one deserves to be tested rigorously. But the law offers a specific, evidence-driven mechanism for testing exactly that gap, built by the Supreme Court in Rajnesh v. Neha for precisely this purpose, and reaching instead for the blunt instrument of a criminal perjury complaint does not accelerate justice — it delays it, by opening a second front in a war that was always meant to be fought and won on the first one.
That, to me, is what separates a case well fought from a case merely felt. The law is patient with genuine grievances pursued through the right door. It is considerably less patient with real grievances pursued through the wrong one — and a Senior Advocate’s first job, more often than any client expects, is simply pointing them toward the door that actually opens.
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