Banglore : Can a daughter claim a share in her father’s property if he decides to sell it? In a recent case, the Karnataka High Court rejected a daughter’s claim to a share in properties owned by her father, ruling that she had failed to establish that the properties were ancestral or coparcenary in nature. The court held that she could acquire a right by birth only if the properties were proven to have such a legal character.
The woman, based in the US, has been living abroad since her marriage in 1979. She filed a suit seeking partition of family properties and an equal share in them after her father sold one property. The woman claimed that Schedule A was ancestral property which had fallen to her father’s share. She further claimed that income generated through quarrying on that property had been used to acquire Schedule B. She also claimed that her father had inherited Schedules C and D and that the income from the family properties had contributed to the family’s other assets.
Court considered whether Schedules A, C and D were the self-acquired properties of the woman’s father or whether he had inherited them from his ancestors in a manner that made them joint Hindu family properties. Her paternal uncle said Schedule A had been purchased by his father. He also admitted that the portion forming Schedule A had come to the woman’s father’s share and that it was absolute property.
His evidence regarding Schedule C was similar. He stated that it had also been purchased by his father and that, in the partition, Schedule C came to the woman’s father’s share. He agreed that Schedule C was the father’s absolute property. The court therefore concluded that Schedules A, C and D were not ancestral or coparcenary properties. They had become the individual and separate properties of the woman’s father.
“These properties are neither the joint Hindu family properties nor coparcenery properties. These properties became individual/separate properties of defendant No.1,” the court said. The High Court specifically said that if the properties in Schedules A, C and D were the grandfather’s self-acquired properties, he had the right to dispose of them. Once they came to his children through the partition, they became the separate properties of those children rather than retaining a coparcenary character.
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