Supreme Court invokes Article 142 in a transfer petition to grant divorce by consent and quash all cases

Hearing petitions filed by a wife seeking to transfer her matrimonial and criminal proceedings out of Odisha, the Supreme Court found that the parties, having reached a settlement, were in fact agreeable to ending their marriage by mutual consent, with the husband having already paid the agreed permanent alimony in full. Rather than simply deciding where the pending cases should be heard, a Bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and R. Mahadevan invoked its power under Article 142 of the Constitution to do 'complete justice', following its own earlier rulings in Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan and Rinku Baheti, to directly dissolve the marriage by mutual consent even though no formal petition for divorce was before it.

The Court dissolved the marriage solemnised in Cuttack in 2016, quashed every pending civil and criminal case between the parties, including the criminal case underlying the transfer petition, and directed that neither party file any fresh case against the other. The ruling shows how transfer petitions filed in a bitterly contested matrimonial dispute can, once the parties settle, become the vehicle through which the Supreme Court uses its Article 142 powers to bring the entire litigation between them to a close in one stroke.