IndiaCourts
UK divorce and British citizenship no shield from bigamy case, Supreme Court rules
The court refused to quash bigamy proceedings against an Andhra Pradesh man who remarried in Britain after a UK divorce his first wife never accepted.
Key points
- The Supreme Court refused to quash bigamy proceedings against N Sridhar Reddy on Tuesday.
- A UK divorce on the ground of irretrievable breakdown is not enforceable in India, the bench held.
- A later change of nationality does not undo the legal effects of a marriage that still stands, the court said.
A man who took British citizenship, obtained a divorce in the United Kingdom and married again there cannot escape a bigamy case in India, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.
A bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Sree Chandrashekhar dismissed the appeal of N Sridhar Reddy against an Andhra Pradesh High Court order that had refused to quash the bigamy proceedings brought by his first wife. Justice Mishra wrote the judgment.
Reddy’s first marriage was solemnised in India under Hindu rites. After he became a UK citizen, a British court granted him a divorce on the ground of irretrievable breakdown of the marriage, and he married a second time in the UK. His first wife then went to court in India.
Why the UK decree failed
The bench held that the foreign decree was not enforceable in India under Section 13 of the Code of Civil Procedure. Irretrievable breakdown is not a ground for divorce under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and the wife had never submitted to the jurisdiction of the British court. In the court’s words, “the foreign divorce decree was passed in contravention of the existing matrimonial law in India”.
Because the decree did not count in India, the court said, Reddy could not rely on it to escape Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code, which punishes marrying again while a spouse is living.
The judges also rejected the argument that the case should turn only on where the second wedding took place. Since the first marriage was performed in India, the inquiry into bigamy cannot be confined to the UK.
On his new passport, the bench was blunt. The “legal consequences flowing from the subsisting marriage cannot be defeated by a subsequent change in the nationality”, it held.
The bigamy case against Reddy will now go ahead in Andhra Pradesh.