The dangers of high interim maintenance

1. Wife continues to get interim maintenance every month, so she is least bothered about finishing up cases quickly whether she has initiated maintenance cases or you have initiated a divorce.
2. Only in cases where wife has a boyfriend she may be in a hurry to get a divorce decree. But that is not true for every case, and even then they usually will not come to zero settlement mutual consent divorce quickly unless husband gives sold evidence to discredit them. Generally speaking, such women will never lose the opportunity to earn good alimony from first husband even if a boyfriend is waiting in line. Also, in many cases it is found that the boyfriend is himself not a respectable kind of person and he is playing along probably to have comfortable life later with money earned from wife's first husband.
3. Unscrupulous women's main motivation is extraction and extortion of money. Many of them are not even bothered about getting a divorce, since probably a married status with maintenance works very well, especially for those with children. As long as they are able to extract a high maintenance every month, they can coolly wait for husband to lose patience and agree to a lumpsum settlement.

 The advantage of low interim maintenance

1. Wife gets Rs 2,500 or 3,500 per month, which is just enough to sustain her. Her hope of getting an instant lumpsum of 20 to 50 lakh or even more are dashed. That creates a psychological pressure and damage.
2. Now even if cases get delayed as they will get anyway in Indian courts, husband doesn't have to worry about bleeding a lot of hard earned money every month to parasitic wife. Paying 2,500 per month is much better than paying 10-15,000 per month.
3. Once interim maintenance is awarded, husband can focus efforts on other things like filing TEP, RTI, collecting more evidence and so on which will help to fight 498A/406 etc. But instead if he has to pay high interim maintenance, he will again go for appeal or revision thereby wasting some time there, which was unnecessary had he fought the cases well in the beginning itself.

Most people do the opposite by spending too much time on 498A even after getting bail. Then they try how to speed up the 498A case so it can be wrapped up within 2 years maximum. Their thinking is that there is someone somewhere sitting who is all eager to listen to their story that they didn't take a penny of dowry and so on, but unfortunately for them they have very little understanding of the Indian courts and the divorce industry. The whole game is rigged in such a way that husband will not get a chance to give his own evidence, or cross-examine wife's evidence for many years to come. All the hope of proving wife's cases to be false depends on leading evidence by both parties, and if that doesn't happen for next 4 years, what hope does husband have in the meantime especially if he is paying high maintenance every month?

So as things stand with respect to on the ground situation in Indian courts and realities of family law cases, denying or reducing maintenance should be the core pillar of husband's strategy in fighting legal cases which can be any combination of marital, maintenance/DV, or criminal cases.

How and why men ignore maintenance cases and get trapped?

Men ignore maintenance cases because of the following reasons:\

1. They think the situation is temporary, that wife is still trying to test them. That she might just come back once again, and in that case automatically the maintenance order will get revoked. They are given this false hope because of positive sounding names like counselling (in CAW) and mediation (in family courts and even DV cases). But the fact is that these proceedings whether under CAW counselling or under mediation, are basically about intimidating men, demonizing men, and making them feel guilty for no reason.
2. Divorce and such false cases (my estimate is 1.5 to 2 lakh per year) are still a small percentage of the overall marriages in the country (about 1 crore per year). So wider society has not been impacted and awareness about marital laws' misuse has not spread out widely outside the MRAs circle. It is quite natural that every husband who experiences such false cases by wife thinks initially that marriages in India don't break easily so things will sort out with time. Unlike the west, where divorce is so common that no one is surprised about that eventuality in one's own marriage, in India no one expects a marriage to break so quickly. This awareness is not there in wider public that many marriages are being done with sole intention of wife filing legal and criminal cases on husband and his family. So it won't be abnormal for most men to believe that this is a bad situation which will cool off rather than worsen.

The result is that by the time many men realize what they have gotten into: that wife is never coming back, that she never had the intention to live a normal married life, that this was a pre-planned scheme by wife/in-laws to extort and get rich at expense of husband. But by then they have been saddled with burden of paying a high interim or final maintenance amount of anywhere from 8K to 25K or even more per month to wife, depending on financial status and income etc.

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