If mutual consent is unavailable — because your spouse refuses to agree or the terms cannot be resolved — you may file a contested divorce petition on a statutory ground. These grounds are exhaustively defined by law, and courts in Nashik and across India grant divorce only on grounds within this list, regardless of how severe the marital breakdown may feel.

Under Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act, the recognised grounds are: cruelty — physical or mental conduct making it unsafe or unreasonable to continue cohabiting; desertion — the respondent having abandoned the petitioner for a continuous two-year period without reasonable cause; conversion to another religion; unsoundness of mind or continuous mental disorder making cohabitation unreasonable; leprosy in virulent and incurable form; venereal disease in communicable form; renunciation of the world; presumption of death after seven years' absence; and for wives, additional grounds including rape, sodomy, or bestiality by the husband, and a maintenance decree without resumption of cohabitation for one year.

In the Nashik Family Court's experience, cruelty and desertion appear in the overwhelming majority of contested petitions, and both are heavily litigated because they require the court to assess degree and pattern from the specific facts of each marriage. The Bombay High Court — at the Mumbai principal seat — has a well-developed body of case law on what constitutes mental cruelty in the modern Maharashtra matrimonial context, and Nashik lawyers and courts follow this jurisprudence closely. Choosing the ground best supported by your actual evidence — rather than the ground that sounds strongest in theory — is the foundation of a winning petition. The divorce advocates at the Nashik panel of Aapka Legal Advice can assess which ground fits your facts and how to build the evidence for it.