India, March 4 -- Maharashtra's food and civil supplies minister Dhananjay Munde has approached a sessions court seeking to quash a metropolitan magistrate court's order directing him to pay an interim monthly maintenance of Rs.2 lakh to his estranged first wife, Karuna Sharma, and their daughter, Shivani Munde.

In his plea, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader has maintained that he was never married to Sharma, due to which the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence (DV) Act, 2005, was not applicable to the case. He also claimed that he is only legally married to Rajshri Munde, as per Hindu rites, since 2001.

Sharma, who had approached the court in 2022 invoking provisions of the DV Act, claiming she had been subjected to ph...