Smoking Gun

The international community has also come down heavily on smoking. Recently the WHO’s 192 members unanimously adopted the Framework on Tobacco control. The treaty is expected to come into force within a year after 40 countries have ratified it.

Under the Treaty, countries are obligated to ban or severely restrict advertising and sponsorship, insert prominent health warnings on packets, protect people from ‘‘second-hand’’ smoking and to clamp down on smuggling. The outgoing Director General of WHO, Gro Harlem Brundtland hailed the event as ‘‘a historic moment in global public health demonstrating the international will to tackle a threat to health head on’’.

Available evidence clearly establishes that smoking is highly injurious to health. Our Supreme Court, in a public interest litigation, banned smoking in several indoor public places. Thereafter a bill has been passed in both the Houses of Parliament to regulate trade in cigarettes and tobacco products.

One of the provisions prohibits smoking in any public place which by definition includes auditoriums, hospitals, amusement centres, restaurants, public offices, court buildings, educational institutions, libraries and public conveyances. Advertisement of cigarettes is banned.

Besides, no package of cigarette can be sold unless it bears prominently the specified warning ‘‘including a pictorial description of skull and cross bones’’. This is pretty macabre but is not likely to put off seasoned smokers. The legislation is likely to be challenged by the powerful tobacco industry directly or through their employees who will be set up to complain of potential unemployment.

It is touching how the hearts of employers bleed for their workers when a winding up petition is filed or legislation prohibiting drinking or smoking is passed. Free speech guarantee will be solemnly invoked on the ground that commercial advertising is part of freedom of expression and the ban on advertisements violates that precious freedom.

It is going to be a long and arduous forensic battle. Lawyers challenging and defending the legislation will surely need a few puffs to soothe their nerves along with the cup that cheers.

Mental Cruelty

Divorces have been granted on the ground of mental cruelty which can be far more painful than physical cruelty. The conception of mental cruelty varies.

An English Court in 1949 held that no course of conduct was more calculated to be destructive of married life than persistent and deliberate sulking and sullen silences and granted the wife a divorce.

Nagging has been held to be cruelty if it is constant and is of such kind that it endangers the health of the spouse. In this case, the husband got relief.

Mistrust mars any matrimonial relationship. The husband who was an Army officer filed a suit for divorce because his wife, who suspected him of having relations with a girl in Agra, sent letters to the President, the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and the Chief of Army Staff requesting that her husband should be posted to a field area immediately so that he was far away from his suspected girlfriend.

The Allahabad High Court observed that no matter how strong the wife’s resentment, it was most abnormal for her to adopt such a course. The Court held that the husband had been subject to mental torture and humiliation in the extreme by the wife’s conduct and granted him a divorce.

The Supreme Court recently had to deal with a case in which the husband had indulged in character assassination of his wife in his written statement filed in Court. Those allegations were unconditionally withdrawn subsequently. Counsel for the husband argued that no decree for divorce on the ground of cruelty could be granted on the basis of those withdrawn allegations. The Supreme Court did not agree.

It held that deliberate statements levelling serious accusations against the wife with pungency and that too placed on record, through the written statement, ‘‘cannot so lightly be ignored or brushed aside’’.

Apparently there is no room for repentance for husbands. Can that be regarded as judicial cruelty to husband?