Critic Takeaways of Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020)
- The Supreme Court upheld the retroactive implementation of the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, which grants daughters equal rights to inherit property.
- Regardless of their father’s existence at the time of the amendment’s initiation, daughters are entitled to the status of coparcener.
- Section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act grants daughters complete entitlements, enabling them to assert their right to divide coparcenary property.
- Section 6 introduces the legal concept of partition, which is used to determine the portion of the dead coparcener’s estate that should be allocated to female heirs.
Facts of the case
The case in question raised the issue of whether the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, which grants daughters equal rights to inherit ancestral property, has a retrospective effect. Specifically, the question is whether the act applies to situations where the father of the appellant daughter had already passed away before the act came into force in 2005.
Judgment of the court
In this case, the Supreme Court of India determined that the 2005 amendment had a retroactive impact. As a result, a daughter would have the status of a coparcener throughout her whole life, regardless of whether her father is alive or deceased, or whether he was alive or deceased at the time the 2005 amendment came into effect.
According to the court’s ruling, girls, whether born before or after the 2005 modification, are considered equivalent to sons in terms of their position as coparceners under Section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act. The court affirmed the decision of the case Danamma @ Suman Surpur versus Amar (2018), in which the highest court determined that Section 6 provisions provide complete rights to the daughter coparcener. Any individual who is a coparcener, regardless of their gender, has the right to request a division of the coparcenary property.
The provision of Section 6 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, first established a legal assumption of partition, but it did not really result in the physical division or dissolution of the joint family property. The purpose of the fiction was to determine the portion of the dead coparcener’s inheritance where he was only survived by a female heir or a male relative of such a female.
