MUMBAI: Thirty-six years after a Malabar Hill woman passed away, the Bombay high court on Wednesday granted probate to her will of 1989 in which she had bequeathed her wealth to her London-based daughter while leaving the son she lived with out of it. Under the Indian Succession Act, probate is the court’s seal of approval on a will that makes it valid and enforceable. The court rejected the son’s argument that his sister had influenced his mother’s decision with expensive gifts.
“We do not see anything unnatural in the conduct of the plaintiff (daughter). She was residing in the UK and was financially well-off. It was contested by Shantaben’s son Prithviraj, who passed away while the appeal was pending in court. Shantaben had inherited her share from her late husband.
The court was hearing an appeal filed by the daughter in 2011 against the single judge’s decision. The deceased Shantaben Patel died in 1990, after which her daughter Meena had sought probate of her will made in 1989. She had bequeathed her 50% share in the family firm AP Patel & Company to Meena, according to Shantaben’s will.
Therefore, when she came back to Mumbai, naturally she would bring some gifts for her mother,” the judges said. Because shantaben had excluded even her grandchildren, Prithviraj’s children, from her will, prithviraj’s counsel had argued that the will was suspicious.
“It would be too much to hold that the mother would be influenced by these gifts to the extent of giving her daughter the entire property to the exclusion of her only son and his family,” a division bench of Justices Sarang Kotwal and Ranjitsinha Bhonsale observed while overruling a 2010 decision of the single judge who had rejected the validity of the will in which the daughter was the main beneficiary. The judges said that the main reason that had weighed on the single judge’s decision was that the daughter showered her mother with expensive gifts, took her on a pilgrimage, and helped her procure a passport to visit her in London. The court noted that Shantaben had, in her will, cited a reason for not giving anything to her son, as he had received “sufficient estate under the will of her late husband”. He said that she had lived in the same flat with them. The judges, however, said that Shantaben had given the reason that her son’s family had received enough wealth through her husband’s will. This reason for her son’s exclusion from her will, the court said, “cannot be termed as suspicious or unnatural”.
His legal heirs then took his place before the court.
