A qualified woman’s decision to pursue her career, and ensure a stable and safe environment for her child cannot be branded as “cruelty” or “desertion”, the Supreme Court said on Tuesday.“To brandish the effort of the wife to pursue her own career goals as acts of cruelty, as the same may have hurt the sentiments of the husband or the in-laws, is highly objectionable and deplorable in the era where the society proudly talks of women empowerment,” a Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta said.Terming it as “feudalistic”, “regressive” and “ultra-conservative”, the top court frowned upon a family court’s decision upheld by the Gujarat High Court which held that a woman’s pursuit of her professional career as a dentist amounted to “cruelty” and “desertion”.Emphasising that a wife’s professional identity was not subject to an “implied spousal veto” and that marriage did not “eclipse her individuality”, the Bench set aside concurrent findings of cruelty and desertion recorded against the woman in the family court and the high court in a matrimonial dispute initiated by her husband, an Army officer.The top court, however, chose not to disturb the decree of divorce in view of the fact that the marriage had irretrievably broken down and the husband had remarried even as it expunged all findings of cruelty and desertion against the wife. It modified the decree of divorce to reflect that it was passed solely on the grounds of the irretrievable breakdown of marriage and not on cruelty or desertion.“The expectation that a woman must invariably sacrifice her career and conform to traditional notions of an obedient wife meant for cohabitation, irrespective of her own aspirations or the welfare of the child, reflects a line of reasoning that is archaic, ultra-conservative, and cannot be countenanced in the present-day scenario,” it said.Married in 2009, the wife started a dental practice in Pune in 2010 only to join her husband in Kargil in 2011. Following pregnancy, she joined her in-laws in Ahmedabad and thereafter her parents. In April 2012, she gave birth to a daughter who developed serious medical complications, and they moved back to Ahmedabad for the child’s treatment. In 2022, the family court, Ahmedabad, granted divorce to the husband on the grounds of cruelty and desertion, citing her refusal to join her husband at his place of posting.Writing the judgment for the Bench, Justice Mehta said, “The endeavour of the appellant to establish her own dental clinic at Ahmedabad, rather than allowing the professional qualification she had earned through years of effort to lie dormant and go waste, has been viewed with disapproval, merely because her stance did not conform to the expectation of the husband and the in-laws that she must abandon her aspirations and reside with her husband at a remote location.”