The Chhattisgarh High Court has reinforced that daughters hold equal rights to ancestral and inherited property under the Hindu Succession Act (as amended in 2005), rejecting the older Mitakshara doctrine which denied daughters coparcenary status by birth. In a dispute over property inherited from a matriarch, the plaintiff sought a declaration of title and an injunction based on a purported will, while the defendants counterclaimed for partition on the basis that as daughters they were entitled as coparceners. The trial court had accepted the plaintiff’s claim and dismissed the counterclaim.
On appeal, the High Court examined the validity of the will and the substantive rights under succession law. It found the will to be fundamentally flawed—there was insufficient proof of the testator’s capacity, the document lacked proper attestation, and there was no convincing evidence that it was executed freely in the presence of witnesses. Consequently, the court declined to give effect to the will, and determined that the property must devolve through intestate succession by operation of law.
Turning to the succession question, the court noted that the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act explicitly confers upon daughters the status of coparceners by birth, equating their rights with those of sons. The judges observed that the statutory change repudiated the Mitakshara principle that denied daughters a share in ancestral property by birth. Under the amended law, daughters acquire equal rights in both ancestral and inherited property, whether by birth or adoption, without needing to derive rights from male lineage.
The court also clarified that the right of a coparcener arises at birth and does not depend on devolution. In other words, legislative reform grants the daughter a pre-existing right rather than one that is conferred later. The judgement thus ordered that the earlier judgment favoring the plaintiff be set aside, upheld the counterclaim, and directed a partition of the property in equal shares between sons and daughters.
This ruling cements the legal principle that the 2005 Amendment to the Hindu Succession Act transformed the inheritance regime by ensuring gender equality in coparcenary rights. The decision confirms that courts must now apply the amended statutory framework rather than outdated doctrinal rules, and that daughters are rightful equal claimants to family property, regardless of traditional Mitakshara constraints.
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