The court ordered the son to pay ₹5 lakh to his father for his “pernicious attempt” to drag the senior citizen into frivolous court proceedings

Published on: Aug 28, 2026, 08:25:20 IST

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MUMBAI: Calling court proceedings initiated by a son against his 78-year-old father “malicious”, the Bombay High Court on Tuesday dismissed the son’s application seeking examination of the father, a retired IAS officer, by a medical board constituted under section 105 of the Mental Health (MH) Act, 2017. The court ordered the son to pay ₹5 lakh to his father for his “pernicious attempt” to drag the senior citizen into frivolous court proceedings.

Dismissing the 54-year-old son’s appeal against an order of a single judge who had, in February, dismissed his petition seeking a medical examination, claiming his father suffered from mental illness, a division bench of Justices A S Gadkari and Kamal Khata observed, “Such a conduct by a son against his aged father (suffering from various illnesses) cannot be and should not be tolerated under any circumstances by this court. He deserves to be severely reprimanded for his conduct.”

The son, a resident of Andheri, had filed a suit against his father for the partition of a coparcenary ancestral property in 2015 that remains pending in court. In December 2025, he filed an interim application before a single judge of the high court, urging it to set up an independent medical board under the MH Act to examine and assess the mental condition of his father, claiming he was mentally ill. To support his claim, he had produced a medical certificate of July 2024 recording his father’s diabetes with recurrent hypoglycemic episodes and associated cognitive symptoms.

The court said the medical certificate the son had relied on only showed that his father was a diabetic patient, who experienced hypoglycemia episodes following insulin administration, manifesting in transient symptoms like delusions, confusion, forgetfulness and perspiration. Significantly, the judges said, the medical certificate itself acknowledged that these symptoms were temporary. They said they agreed with the single judge’s finding that “episodic and reversible symptoms arising from an underlying metabolic condition cannot, prima facie, be equated with or construed as mental illness”.

Justices Gadkari and Khata noted that it was evident that the son had not raised these contentions earlier, before another division bench of the court, which heard a petition over the eviction of the son under the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 from the father’s property. Even as he relied on a medical certificate of July 2024, which was already on the court’s record in the eviction case, the son had filed his interim application for his father’s examination under the MH Act before the single judge just days before the other division bench’s order in the eviction case.

Justices Gadkari and Khata agreed with the single judge’s order of February, in which he inferred that the son’s application was an “instrument of litigation strategy” against his father. They concurred with the single judge, who held that the MH Act “is intended to operate as a shield for the protection of persons with mental illness and cannot be permitted to be wielded as a sword against them by an adversarial party.”

The judges said the son’s attempt was “nothing short of an afterthought and a malicious proceeding invoked to drag the respondent No.1 (father)….into several proceedings so that he would give up and succumb to the appellant’s (son) demands.”

Earlier, before the single judge, the son had questioned his father’s mental competence to contest various criminal and civil disputes between them. He had alleged that his father, also an Andheri resident, lived separately with his step-mother, a doctor, who denied him access to the elderly man.

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