INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
KOLKATA: The Calcutta High Court recently let a 13-year-old boy, in the midst of a bitter parental custody battle, decide for himself whom
he wanted to stay with, saying he was "intelligent and matured enough" to decide the matter on his own.The boy was allowed to return to his
father, who lives in a joint family, and stay with his grandparents and uncles
The mother was given twice-a-month visitation rights and permission to interact with the child on phone or video calls over the weekend and
a month's custody per year.The father, who's a schoolteacher based in Balurghat, his parents and brother are out on bail but facing
criminal charges filed by the wife, a Malda-based academic, for physically and mentally torturing her
The couple are also locked in divorce proceedings.Married in 2008, their son was born in 2010
The marriage broke apart in 2017, when the wife left her in-laws' home with the child and lodged a criminal case
The custody battle is also being fought in the courts for the last six years
The high court heard the case after the father complained that he was not being allowed to meet his son for these six years
"The child is intelligent and matured enough to decide his custody
He is capable of forming an intelligent preference regarding his custody," the division bench of justices Soumen Sen and Uday Kumar remarked
in their order on February 28
The child had told the judges that he was "very happy" at his father's place, in the joint family
At his mother's in Malda, however, he felt lonely after coming home from school, he told them.The child told the court that ideally, he
wanted to stay at his father's place with both parents
The court at first tried to save the marriage, but was not successful
The court even proposed joint parenting, which also failed
said that the welfare of a minor child would prevail over the legal rights of the parties in a custody battle
his maternal grandparents, who were school principals
The court even asked the principal of the private school where the child studied from KG, before his parents separated, to readmit the
