A divorce obtained in a foreign court on a ground that Indian law does not recognise cannot dissolve a marriage solemnised here, and a person who remarries on the strength of such a decree remains liable to prosecution for bigamy, the Supreme Court has held.
A bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Shree Chandrashekhar refused to interfere with the Andhra Pradesh High Court's order declining to quash the bigamy case against the husband. Justice Mishra authored the judgment, delivered on November 3.
The court was hearing a man who married his first wife at Sattenapalli in Andhra Pradesh on April 18, 2003, under Hindu rites and customs. He later took British citizenship, in February 2013, and instituted divorce proceedings before the Cambridge County Court in England in August 2013. That court made the decree absolute on January 29, 2014, on the ground of irretrievable breakdown of marriage, a ground the Hindu Marriage Act does not provide for. He married a second time in the United Kingdom in March 2014.
His first wife complained at the Sattenapalli town police station in Guntur in February 2016, alleging bigamy and criminal conspiracy under Sections 494 and 120B read with Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code.
"In our view, the foreign divorce decree was passed in contravention of the existing matrimonial law in India and on a ground that is not even recognised statutorily," the bench said, adding that it violates "the legal threshold of Section 13 of the CPC, which every foreign decree has to pass through."
The court relied on its 1991 ruling in Y. Narasimha Rao vs Y. Venkata Lakshmi, which held that a foreign decree must meet Section 13 of the Code of Civil Procedure, and on its 2026 decision in Kishorekumar Mohan Kale vs Kashmira Kale.
On the husband's argument that his first wife had submitted to the foreign court's jurisdiction, the bench recorded that she had objected to it, and held that her participation could not be read as unconditional submission. It said the sanctity of matrimonial status cannot be allowed to yield to "forum non conveniens", the doctrine of the inconvenient forum.
Citizenship made no difference, the court held. "Even if the second marriage took place outside India, the allegations under Section 494 of the IPC cannot be said to be diluted since enquiry for the offence of bigamy cannot be confined to the place of second marriage but must necessarily take into account the subsisting matrimonial relationship," it said, adding that legal consequences of a subsisting marriage "cannot be defeated by a subsequent change in the nationality" of the husband.
The bench also rejected the plea that delay in lodging the FIR justified quashing, noting that bigamy is a continuing offence. It quashed the proceedings against the husband's parents and his second wife, finding no material to show that they had conspired in or knowingly aided the second marriage.
Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code, which provides for up to seven years' imprisonment for marrying again during the lifetime of a spouse, now corresponds to Section 82 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
(Compiled from PTI and media reports with the help of our in-house AI tools, and edited by our desk)
Pioneer News Service