If mutual consent is unavailable — because your spouse refuses to agree, or because the terms cannot be resolved — you may file a contested divorce petition on a statutory ground. These grounds are exhaustively defined by law; a divorce cannot be granted outside them no matter how severe the breakdown of the marriage may feel, and knowing which ground fits your facts is the essential starting point.

Under Section 13 of the Hindu Marriage Act, the recognised grounds for contested divorce are: cruelty — physical or mental conduct making it unsafe or unreasonable to continue living together; desertion — the respondent having abandoned the petitioner for two continuous years 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 by entering a religious order; presumption of death after seven years' absence; and, for wives, additional grounds including rape, sodomy, or bestiality by the husband after marriage, and a maintenance decree without resumption of cohabitation for one year. Adultery, while removed as a criminal offence, can still be pleaded as a component of cruelty in modern matrimonial practice.

In the Vadodara Family Court's experience, cruelty and desertion are the two grounds that appear most frequently in contested petitions, and they are also the most heavily litigated because both involve questions of degree and pattern that require careful evidence. The Gujarat courts, including the Gujarat High Court at Ahmedabad, have developed a substantial body of case law on what constitutes mental cruelty in the modern matrimonial context — and the test is whether the conduct makes it unreasonable for the petitioner to continue the marriage, not merely whether it was unpleasant. Choosing the ground that is best supported by your actual evidence — rather than the ground that sounds strongest in the abstract — is the foundation of a case that succeeds. The family law advocates at the Vadodara panel of Aapka Legal Advice can assess which ground fits your specific facts and how to document it effectively.