The Bombay High Court’s Nagpur bench decided on Saturday that the two children per parent restriction for panchayat members in Maharashtra would only apply to biological children and not stepchildren.
Khairunisa Sheikh Chand filed a petition challenging her exclusion from serving on a gram panchayat on the grounds that she has more than three children. A division bench of Justices A S Chandurkar and Vrushali Joshi ordered that the petition be heard on the merits by a single bench of the high court.
Chand stated in her court filing that Sheikh Chand had two boys from a previous marriage and that they now only had one child together.
To determine whether the phrase “two children” in the provisions of the Maharashtra Village Panchayats Act has been used in a general meaning to include stepchildren or in a limited sense to signify only children born to the person, the single bench referred the subject to the division bench. The division bench stated in its ruling that the phrase “two children” has a clear relationship to the term “member” as employed in the Act’s provision.
In the case of a male member, the phrase “two children” would refer to all of his children for whose birth he is responsible, regardless of whether they were conceived outside of his prior and/or current marriage. The court ruled that all children a female member has given birth to fall within this definition, regardless of whether they were conceived out of her prior or current marriage.
Sukrut Sohoni, the petitioner’s attorney, stated that the term “two children” under the Act would only refer to the person in question’s biological children and that the person’s stepchildren could not be taken into account for disqualification.
In its ruling, the high court said that anyone—male or female—may be disqualified if they had previously given birth to a kid or children via marriage and then had another child or children through a later marriage. The court ruled that it must be determined that the phrase “two children” refers to the “person” who is a member of a panchayat and is the subject of the request for disqualification.
No matter how many marriages a male member has, he will be disqualified if he is involved in the birth of more than two children, it was stated. In its ruling, the court said that the same parallel would apply to a female member who had given birth to more than two children, regardless of whether the children were born from a former marriage or a current one.
The rule was intended to exclude someone who had given birth to more than two children, the court observed. The court ruled that it is not the intention of the aforementioned law to prevent someone with more than two children from a prior marriage from getting remarried.
