NEW DELHI: A Rolls-Royce car of 1951 vintage, one of its kind built by H J Mulliner & Co for the Maharani of Baroda and ordered on her behalf by India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, appears to have wrecked the marriage of the daughter of a Gwalior royal family, reports Dhananjay Mahapatra.
The girl and the family claimed their ancestor was admiral of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and the ruler of Konkan. The boy, whose father was a colonel in the Army, carried on the lucrative family business of running an educational institution at Indore. Both gave different accounts of how the ‘rista’ got finalised and the engagement took place in Gwalior in March 2018 and the marriage in Rishikesh a month later. But one fact was common. The bride was never taken to her matrimonial home amid disputes.
The man filed a complaint against the girl and her parents for cheating his family of a large sum of money during the wedding.
The woman retaliated with a dowry harassment FIR against the boy man and his family. But this FIR was quashed by MP HC. She moved SC challenging it. She said the man was so enamoured by the Rolls-Royce car that he and his parents demanded that as part of dowry along with a flat in Mumbai.
Senior advocate Vibha Datta Makhija Wednesday told the SC bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan the woman is in a piquant position as “in her old-fashioned royal community, there is no tradition of re-marriage.” The bench appointed former HC judge R Basant as the mediator for conducting conciliation proceedings between the warring parties.