3 min readNew DelhiSep 8, 2026 10:45 AM IST
The Calcutta High Court has refused to quash a cruelty case against a man accused of hiding his existing marriage and living with another woman as her husband and held that questions over the validity of the marriage cannot be a reason to end a case under the legal provision dealing with cruelty.
Justice Uday Kumar was hearing a criminal revision petition filed by the man seeking quashing of proceedings arising from a case registered in 2022 for the offences of cheating, extortion, among others.
On September 2, the court stated that it would be a complete injustice to let a man off the hook for abusing a woman simply because their marriage was legally invalid, when he was the one who tricked her into living together while hiding his existing marriage.
“The traditional, narrow construct requiring a flawless traditional marriage as an absolute prerequisite for invoking Section 498A of the IPC stands firmly displaced by modern purposive interpretation…where consenting adults cohabit in a relationship ‘in the nature of marriage’, evidenced by a shared household, societal recognition as spouses, and an intrinsic intent to marry, the penal and protective mantle of Section 498A extends fully to such domestic arrangements,” the court said.
‘Man claimed to be unmarried orphan’
In 2019, a woman met a man who claimed to be an unmarried orphan. She alleged that he convinced her to convert to Islam, and they married in July 2020. However, after discovering he was already married, she suffered physical and emotional abuse until he forced her out of their home in May 2022.
The high court the statement of the couple’s landlord, who said the they lived in his premises as man and wife. The woman, however, had no formal documentary proof of the alleged Muslim marriage. The man, on the other hand, relied on it and the alleged subsistence of the woman’s previous marriage to argue that there was no valid marriage between them.
The state counsel opposed the plea and argued that deception and the nature of their relationship were disputed facts and matter of trial.
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Based on Supreme Court rulings, the court stated that a legal marriage is not required to file charges if the evidence proves the couple lived like a married couple. Applying this rule, the court pointed to evidence of cohabitation—such as the landlord’s statement that they lived together as husband and wife—and ruled that the criminal case could proceed.
The High Court, therefore, directed the trial court to proceed expeditiously while ordering that the trial remained “entirely uninfluenced” by its incidental observations.
