Will not invalid just for omission of legal heirs: Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: Observing that a person is legally entitled to dispose of his property as he wishes, Supreme Court has ruled that a will cannot be invalidated just on the ground that legal heirs have been denied a share.

A bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Vijay Bishnoi said the exclusion of natural heirs from a property, by itself, cannot be construed as a suspicious circumstance and dismissed the plea of the wife and children of a chartered accountant challenging the validity of his will.

Unless exclusion of legal heirs is accompanied by suspicious circumstances affecting the genuineness or execution of the will, the exclusion alone does not render a will invalid, SC said. It noted that the will in question clearly specified that the testator has not done any injustice to his wife, children, or other relatives, and that he has given enough to them.

In the will made in 1983, the CA bequeathed all the scheduled properties in the favour of his only sister. He died just six months thereafter and then started a legal battle among family members which went on for 43 years before it was finally adjudicated by the apex court.

"The contention of the appellants (wife, children) that they, being the natural heirs of the testator, have been outrightly excluded without any reason and that such exclusion constitutes a suspicious circumstance surrounding the execution of the will is legally untenable. It is well-established that mere deprivation of natural heirs, by itself, may not amount to a suspicious circumstance because the whole idea behind the execution of a will is to interfere with the normal line of succession," it said.

The CA's will, the bench said, "was duly executed by the testator voluntarily out of his free will in a sound state of mind and the same stands proved through the testimony of one of the attesting witnesses who was examined by the trial court. This witness categorically stated that the testator executed the will in question in his presence, and that both he and the testator signed the will in the presence of each other".