Abstract

The Hindu Succession Act, 1956 being a prologue in women’s property right, it could not bring in tenable equality as it did not embrace within its ambit, the ancestral property. The Hindu Succession Amendment Act, 2005 came as a windfall to the women whereby certain provisions uplifting the status of women, along with extending coparcener status to daughters, which entails women equal right to property even in the ancestral property. Accordingly, this progressive legislation in nature of a Declaratory Act might be given retrospective operation. This led to trepidation among individuals possessing a vested right by way of notional partition in the ancestral property. When the balance between the retrospective operation of the amendment and vested right was imprecise, the Supreme court by setting a cut- off on women’s right to claim ancestral property in 2015 has opened the Pandora’s box. Later, the Supreme Court has cleared the air in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma by securing Hindu women the coparcenary right by birth, and it has got nothing to do with the Father’s life, and notional partition being a legal fiction will not lead to a vested right at all, in this context; this article essentially touches on various such interpretations, and attempts to elucidate the justifications.

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