A single judge of a Sessions Court in Mumbai held as follows:

From Para 5,

5] Perusal of the application under Section 12 of the D. V. Act filed by the applicant has several references to the alleged domestic violence committed by the respondent No. 1. It is not in dispute that he resides separately and not with the appellant or the respondent No. 1. The learned Metropolitan Magistrate in his impugned order has observed that since the respondent No. 1 never resided with the appellant in any shared household he cannot be considered to be the respondent as defined by Section 2 (q) of the D. V. Act. He, therefore, omitted him from the array of the respondents in the main application.

From Para 6,

6] Such an observation of the learned Metropolitan Magistrate however, is wholly misplaced. It is for the simple reason that the proviso to Section 2 (q) of the D. V. Act makes it very clear that an aggrieved wife can also file a complaint against a relative of the husband. The Act nowhere mandates that an aggrieved person can seek relief only against the persons who have shared household with her. Had that been so, it would have been very convenient to cause violence or any other trouble to the aggrieved person through the relatives not sharing the same household and yet remained out of the clutches of the D. V. Act. Rather, holding that any relative of the husband if not sharing or shared the same household cannot be a respondent would amount to giving licence to those relatives to commit violence to the aggrieved person and thereby rendering the very Act meaningless. That just cannot be and certainly was not the intention while enacting the said statute. As observed earlier, there are sufficient references to show that the respondent No. 1 was also a party to the domestic violence committed to the appellant. As such, the proceedings against him was certainly tenable. The learned Metropolitan Magistrate was obviously wrong in holding that the respondent No. 1 since not shared the household with the appellant could not be a respondent as defined by Section 2 (q) of the D. V. Act. Consequently, the impugned order cannot sustain.

A Revision was dismissed by the Bombay High Court here.

Index of DV Cases here.