Context: The Supreme Court expanded on a Hindu woman’s right to be a joint legal heir and inherit ancestral property on terms equal to male heirs.

Details of the ruling:

A three-judge Bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra ruled that a Hindu woman’s right to be a joint heir to the ancestral property is by birth and does not depend on whether her father was alive or not when the law was enacted in 2005.

The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 gave Hindu women the right to be coparceners or joint legal heirs in the same way a male heir does.

Since the coparcenary is by birth, it is not necessary that the father coparcener should be living as on 9.9.2005.

What is the 2005 law?

• The Mitakshara school of Hindu law codified as the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 governed succession and inheritance of property but only recognised males as legal heirs.
• The law applied to everyone who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew by religion.
• Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and followers of Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj are also considered Hindus for the purposes of this law.
• In a Hindu Undivided Family, several legal heirs through generations can exist jointly.
• Traditionally, only male descendants of a common ancestor along with their mothers, wives and unmarried daughters are considered a joint Hindu family. The legal heirs hold the family property jointly.
• Women were recognised as coparceners or joint legal heirs for partition arising from 2005.
• Section 6 of the Act was amended that year to make a daughter of a coparcener also a coparcener by birth “in her own right in the same manner as the son”.
• The law also gave the daughter the same rights and liabilities “in the coparcenary property, as she would have had if she had been a son”.

Reference:

https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/reading-supreme-court-verdict-on-hindu-womens-inheritance-rights-6550767/

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