Why Supreme Court is concerned with marriage battles choking its docket

When the Supreme Court made a stern remark on January 20 that “warring couples cannot make courts their battlefield,” it was doing more than expressing fatigue with a bitter matrimonial dispute. The remark was made by a Bench of Justices Rajesh Bindal and Manmohan while dissolving a marriage under Article 142, which enables the apex court to pass such decree or order for doing complete justice in any matter.

The judgment reflects a growing institutional concern: that private marital conflicts are increasingly mutating into sprawling, multi-forum litigation clusters that consume disproportionate judicial time.

The case that triggered the warning offered a stark illustration. The marriage had lasted just 65 days. The litigation that followed lasted more than a decade. During this period, the estranged spouses filed over 40 cases against each other, spanning family courts, magistrate courts, high courts, and finally the Supreme Court.

Divorce proceedings, maintenance claims, domestic violence cases, criminal complaints, execution petitions, transfer petitions, applications alleging perjury...the SC sees a pattern with increasing frequency.

The docket included divorce proceedings, maintenance claims, domestic violence cases, criminal complaints, execution petitions, transfer petitions, and even applications alleging perjury. For the Supreme Court, this was not an aberration but a pattern it sees with increasing frequency.

The judgment, authored by Justice Bindal, penalised the couple by imposing Rs 10,000 as costs payable by each of them to the Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association.

Litigation clusters

Unlike most civil disputes, matrimonial breakdowns in India are uniquely capable of generating parallel and overlapping proceedings. A single marital conflict can simultaneously give rise to proceedings under the Hindu Marriage Act, Section 125 of the erstwhile Criminal Procedure Code (now Section 144 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita), the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, and various provisions of the Indian Penal Code (now Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023). Each of these proceedings has its own interim stages, enforcement mechanisms, and appellate routes.

Also read: Why Jane Austen's theme of marriage is no longer central to the lives of Indian women

What concerns the Supreme Court is not merely the number of cases, but their cumulative procedural footprint. Each case requires repeated listings, interim orders, compliance hearings, and enforcement proceedings.

When one party initiates a new proceeding, the other typically responds with a counter-proceeding. Over time, litigation becomes not a means of resolution but a strategy of attrition.

The Court has explicitly noted that such disputes often escalate into “teach-a-lesson” litigation, where the objective shifts from securing relief to exhausting the opposing party. Criminal proceedings, especially those involving arrest or the threat of arrest, frequently become points of no return, hardening positions and foreclosing the possibility of reconciliation.

Why so many knock SC's door

One of the most visible manifestations of this phenomenon at the apex level is the flood of transfer petitions. The Supreme Court has observed that a substantial number of matrimonial matters reach it not on merits, but through requests to transfer cases from one court to another, often on grounds of hardship, distance, or safety.

These petitions are data points in themselves. Each transfer petition signals that a dispute has already spread across jurisdictions. A matrimonial case pending in a family court in one state may be accompanied by criminal proceedings in another, making the Supreme Court the only forum capable of consolidating or rationalising the litigation geography.

Also read: Why despite progressive image, Kerala continues to struggle with accepting interfaith marriages

Beyond transfer petitions, the Court increasingly sees Article 142 pleas seeking dissolution of marriage on the ground of irretrievable breakdown. While irretrievable breakdown is not a statutory ground for divorce, the Supreme Court has, in a line of cases culminating in authoritative recognition of this power, dissolved marriages where continuation served no purpose except prolonging litigation. These cases often arrive after years of failed mediation, multiple criminal proceedings, and dozens of interim orders.

Judicial time as finite resource

The Court’s concern is ultimately about judicial capacity. Matrimonial disputes are fact-heavy, emotionally charged, and procedurally dense. When they reach the Supreme Court, they occupy time that could otherwise be devoted to constitutional adjudication, serious criminal appeals, or questions of national importance.

Court records and annual reports show that family and matrimonial matters form a significant component of civil litigation at the district and high court levels. When even a small fraction of these disputes escalates to the Supreme Court through transfer petitions or Article 142 pleas, the institutional cost is substantial.

The Court’s recent warning explicitly frames such litigation as capable of “choking the system”. This language signals a shift from viewing matrimonial disputes as purely private conflicts to recognising their systemic limits — the way they divert scarce judicial resources and slow down adjudication for other litigants.

Mediation: from ideal to necessity

It is in this context that the Court’s renewed emphasis on mediation must be understood. The judgment urges courts to explore mediation at the earliest possible stage, even before calling for replies. It notes that pleadings and counter-pleadings often aggravate hostility, locking parties into adversarial positions from which retreat becomes difficult.

Also read: India records 20 dowry deaths a day; Nikki Bhati only the latest

Mediation is presented as a tool of docket management and conflict containment. The Family Courts Act, 1984, already mandates efforts toward settlement, and the Mediation Act, 2023, has formally recognised pre-litigation mediation and structured court-referred mediation. What the Supreme Court is now signalling is that failure to deploy these tools early has measurable institutional costs.

When one party initiates a new proceeding, the other typically responds with a counter-proceeding. Over time, litigation becomes not a means of resolution but a strategy of attrition.

Data from court-annexed Mediation Centres supports this pragmatic view. The Indian Judiciary: Annual Report (p 322) shows that the Supreme Court Mediation Centre received 1,743 cases between July 2024 and June 2025, with 358 resulting in settlements. Family and matrimonial disputes form a substantial share of these referrals. At the high-court level, publicly available data tells a similar story.

The Delhi High Court’s Mediation and Conciliation Centre, Samadhan, reports hundreds of court-referred mediations every year, with matrimonial cases consistently among the largest categories. National compilations by the National Legal Services Authority also indicate that family disputes account for a significant portion of mediation activity across courts. The picture that emerges is not of universal success, but of scale: when matrimonial disputes are referred early, a meaningful number exit the court system altogether.

The Supreme Court’s concern is that this opportunity is often lost once litigation escalates across multiple forums.

The irony, which the Court candidly acknowledges, is that mediation often fails once litigation has fully escalated. In the very case that prompted the warning, mediation attempts were unsuccessful. This reinforces the Court’s point: mediation is most effective before arrests, allegations of criminality, and reputational damage entrench hostility.

Article 142 as a circuit-breaker

By invoking Article 142 to dissolve the marriage, the Supreme Court used its extraordinary constitutional power as an institutional circuit-breaker. The objective was not merely to grant relief to the parties, but to terminate a litigation cycle that showed no signs of ending.

Also read: Can spouses secretly record each other? Senior advocate Ajeetha explains

Significantly, the Court also sought to prevent future proliferation by disposing of pending cases and cautioning the parties against initiating further proceedings. At the same time, it carved out allegations of perjury for separate consideration, signalling that while endless matrimonial litigation must end, abuse of the judicial process cannot be ignored.

This calibrated approach reflects the Court’s attempt to balance individual justice with systemic preservation.

Will the warning matter?

No single judgment can reverse entrenched litigation behaviour. Yet such warnings can recalibrate institutional responses. Trial courts may feel reinforced in insisting on early mediation. Lawyers may find greater judicial backing for advising settlement over escalation. And the Supreme Court itself may adopt a firmer stance against allowing private matrimonial wars to occupy its docket indefinitely.

Also read: Why Karnataka 'Mangalya Bhagya' mass-marriage scheme fails to take off

The larger message is clear. Judicial time is a public resource. When private disputes are allowed to spiral into legal warfare, the cost is borne not only by the parties, but by the justice system as a whole. The Supreme Court’s warning is therefore less about disciplining feuding spouses, and more about safeguarding the judiciary’s capacity to perform its constitutional role.

In that sense, the Court is not asking couples to suffer in silence. It is asking that courts not be turned into battlefields — because once that happens, justice itself suffers collateral damage.