Disqualifications Relating to Succession

In one line

Two disqualifications survive in this Act, murder and being the child of a convert, and a person disqualified is treated as having died before the intestate.

Section 24: omitted

Section 24 was headed "Certain widows re-marrying may not inherit as widows", and it was omitted by the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005 with effect from 9 September 2005.

The consolidated Act prints the heading and the omission note, and not the repealed text, so this book states no more about its terms than the heading does. What matters, and is enough, is that the remarriage of a widow is no longer a disqualification under this Act.

The point to make in an answer is the direction of the change. The classical law disqualified an unchaste widow and a widow who remarried, as described in [The Traditional Hindu Law of Succession, before 1956]. The Act of 1956 kept a narrowed version of it in section 24. The amendment of 2005 removed even that. The law no longer takes any interest in whether a widow remarries.

Section 25: the murderer

A person who commits murder or abets the commission of murder shall be disqualified from inheriting the property of the person murdered, or any other property in furtherance of the succession to which he or she committed or abetted the commission of the murder.

Three limbs, and each does work.

"Commits murder or abets the commission of murder." The abettor is disqualified as much as the killer.

"The property of the person murdered." The obvious case: A kills B, and A cannot inherit from B.

"Or any other property in furtherance of the succession to which he committed or abetted the murder." This is the limb students miss, and it is the wider one. A person who murders somebody in order to improve his position in a succession to a third person's estate is disqualified from that estate too.

An example makes it plain. A stands to inherit from his father only if his elder brother B is out of the way. A murders B. A is disqualified not only from B's property but from the father's property, because he committed the murder in furtherance of that succession.

The principle behind the section is that no person may profit from his own crime, and it is the one classical disqualification the Act kept without narrowing.

Section 26: the convert's descendants

Where, before or after the commencement of this Act, a Hindu has ceased or ceases to be a Hindu by conversion to another religion, children born to him or her after such conversion and their descendants shall be disqualified from inheriting the property of any of their Hindu relatives, unless such children or descendants are Hindus at the time when the succession opens.