NEW DELHI: A Pune family court has ordred interim custody of a minor boy to his Singapore-based father, finding that the child’s welfare would be better served with him after the mother defied orders of both Singapore and Indian courts and repeatedly blocked the father’s access to the child.What was the dispute about?A Pune couple got married in 2012 and had a son in March 2016. The family moved to Singapore in 2022, where the father worked as a vice president at a tech firm and the child was enrolled in an international school.In March 2025, while the father was away on a business trip, the mother quietly brought the child back to Pune and enrolled him in a local school. She did not inform the father and refused to return the child to Singapore.The father moved court in Singapore as well as in India. The Singapore family court passed a final custody order in his favour in July 2025, directing the mother to return the child. The mother neither challenged this order nor complied with it. Back in Pune, the father filed a petition before the family court under the Guardianship and Wards Act. The court passed an initial order in May 2025, which the father challenged before the Bombay high court.The high court set it aside and directed the family court to decide the matter afresh, keeping the child’s welfare as the central consideration.What did the court say?In-charge family court Judge Ganesh Ghule granted interim custody to the father on several grounds. The court’s primary concern was that the mother was continuously disobeying judicial orders. A court commissioner appointed to facilitate the father’s access to the child reported non-cooperation from the mother’s side.The judge found that the child had been pressured to call his father a “devil” and had allegedly been told to say he would “not see his father alive.”A 10-year-old writing about death, the court noted, pointed to distress caused by living in such an environment.“If one has to beg and plead to meet and speak with one’s own child, then nothing can be more painful than this,” the judge said.On the Singapore court order, Judge Ghule held that since the mother had neither challenged it nor pointed to any legal infirmity in it, she could not simply choose to ignore it.“Evading such a judicial order is not permissible,” the court said, adding that “court orders should not become mere paper orders.”The court also examined the child’s background in Singapore, where he had lived for nearly three years, studied in Cambridge-curriculum schools, and had built friendships and routines there. It further noted that father held a leadership role and the child’s paternal grandmother available as a caregiver.The court also addressed the mother’s allegations of domestic violence, an extramarital affair and workplace misconduct against the father, but declined to rule on them at this stage, saying they would be examined during a full trial. The court also added that a person of loose character is not automatically a bad father.“Keeping the marriage vows, caring for her husband physically and emotionally, praying for him, and seeking his good in all things is expectation however she treated him as if he and his family is her seven generation enemy thus, in the company of such a women, the future of the Child is not safe,” the court said.The judge listed what he believed were a wife’s duties and said that a woman who does not fulfil these duties cannot be trusted to keep her child safe.The court then directed the mother to hand over the child to the father immediately. It clarified that the order was temporary and would have no bearing on the final outcome of the case.
