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.
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”.
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. 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.
Earlier, before the single judge, the son had questioned his father’s mental competence to contest various criminal and civil disputes between them.
