Patna High Court: WhatsApp chats need a Section 65B certificate

The Patna High Court has held that WhatsApp messages used as electronic evidence require a Section 65B(4) certificate, and that uncertified chats could not be used in a divorce appeal where the Family Court had granted divorce on cruelty grounds. With those messages falling out of the record, the High Court set aside the decree, making the evidentiary rule and the case outcome inseparable in the ruling.

Uncertified WhatsApp chats fall out of the record

The case arose under Section 13(1)(ia) of the Hindu Marriage Act, the provision that allows divorce on the ground of cruelty. In that setting, the bench made a narrow but important point: WhatsApp chats, like other electronic records, need the statutory Section 65B(4) certificate to be admitted. The court also held that oral testimony cannot repair that defect, so a witness speaking about the chats does not substitute for the certificate the law requires.

That mattered directly to the appeal. Once the WhatsApp material was excluded, the Family Court decree granting divorce on cruelty grounds could not stand on the same footing, and the High Court overturned it. For readers who use chats as a record trail, the practical lesson is straightforward: screenshots or printouts alone may not carry evidentiary weight if the required documentation is missing.

Why the Patna bench rejected the cruelty claim

The High Court did not stop with the certificate issue. It also found that the cruelty allegations themselves were too vague to sustain a divorce under Section 13(1)(ia). According to the court, the allegations were scattered across different years and lacked basic particulars such as time, place, and surrounding circumstances, leaving the claim short on the degree and continuity needed for a cruelty finding.

The surrounding facts cut against a case of continuing cruelty. The bench relied on the couple's long cohabitation, the fact that they had two daughters, and their temporary resumption of cohabitation after counselling in June 2022. Those details mattered because the court treated isolated marital disputes as different from a sustained course of conduct serious enough to justify dissolution of marriage.

Once the WhatsApp chats were excluded, the case largely became one spouse's word against the other's. On that record, the husband did not meet the evidentiary burden needed to uphold the divorce decree. The ruling therefore turned on both parts of the analysis: the electronic messages could not come in without the certificate, and the remaining cruelty case was not pleaded or proved with sufficient specificity.

Arjun Panditrao and the evidentiary bar for chat records

The bench anchored its approach in existing Supreme Court law, especially Arjun Panditrao Khotkar on Section 65B certificates for electronic evidence. That is an important limit on how the ruling should be read. The Patna High Court did not create a blanket rule that WhatsApp messages are unusable in court; it applied settled law on how electronic records must be proved.

The judgment also tied the cruelty analysis to the wider rule that isolated disputes within a marriage do not ordinarily establish cruelty over time. In that sense, the decision combines two familiar evidentiary demands: chat records must clear the Section 65B bar, and cruelty claims must show sustained conduct with concrete particulars. For businesses and operators who rely on WhatsApp logs as part of internal records, disputes, or audit trails, the takeaway is not legal advice but evidentiary discipline: if a chat record may later need to survive court scrutiny, the supporting document trail cannot be an afterthought.

Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI. Images are for illustrative purposes only.