5 min readVadodaraUpdated: Aug 29, 2026 10:13 PM IST
A case that began years ago after a Canadian court observed that a man had used marriage purely as a passport to the West has ended, with the Gujarat High Court quashing criminal proceedings against his mother and brother, holding that an FIR alleging cheating and criminal breach of trust cannot rest on “bare statement” of conspiracy alone.
In a judgment pronounced earlier this month, Justice PM Raval allowed two petitions filed by an Anand-based family, seeking to quash an FIR registered in Anand in 2017 for criminal breach of trust, cheating and criminal conspiracy, among other sections, by the uncle of a Canadian woman.
The prosecution’s case was that the petitioner’s son had fraudulently married the woman on March 5, 2013, purely because she held Canadian citizenship, and that once the marriage had served its purpose, the couple divorced on December 21, 2016. The complainant alleged that the husband’s parents and brother had conspired with him and abetted the offence throughout.
The case against the first petitioners—the father-in-law of the Canadian woman, however, stood abated as he passed away in October 2025, the HC was informed through a death certificate placed on record.
Arguments
Advocate Yatin Soni, appearing for the petitioners, told the court that his clients—a retired teacher and another one employed at a private institute in Mehsana—had no specific role attributed to them in the FIR beyond being related to the accused husband.
Soni submitted that the FIR itself was lodged nearly four years after the alleged offence, without any explanation for the delay, and that the marriage had in fact taken place with the consent of both families, solemnised as per Hindu rites in the presence of relatives and community members. The woman, he pointed out, had stayed with the family for barely thirty days in 2013 and never met them again after that. On this basis, he argued that the family had been “falsely roped into the offence merely because divorce took place.”
Opposing the petitions, advocate Shradhdha Pipaliya argued that the FIR, read as a whole, disclosed a strong prima facie case of cheating, since the marriage was contracted only so that the husband could reach Canada and, from there, move to the United States, which he went on to do without ever looking after his wife.
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The state’s submission was centered around an order of the Superior Court of Justice at Ontario, which had granted the divorce to the couple. Referring to that ruling, the prosecution submitted that the Canadian court had observed that “the evidence presented to the Court leaves no doubt that the respondent utilized his marriage to the applicant solely to gain entry into Canada from where he has apparently been able to secure a visa into the United States.” The state argued that this finding had also been forwarded to the immigration authorities of both Canada and the United States, and that it was therefore established that the marriage was a conspiracy in which the present petitioners too had participated.
What the HC held
Justice Raval invoked the Supreme Court’s rulings, which draw a sharp line between criminal breach of trust and cheating. Breach of trust, the Supreme Court had held, requires “entrustment of property”, while cheating requires “dishonest inducement from the very inception of a transaction”, and the two offences, being “mutually exclusive,” cannot be alleged to coexist on the same facts.
Applying that test of the precedents, the HC found that the FIR contained “no averment” suggesting entrustment of property or dominion over property to the petitioners, ruling out Section 406 (criminal breach of trust). On cheating, the court noted that the complaint was “conspicuously silent” on how the petitioners had deceived the woman or “induced her to do anything” to her detriment, and that even the fact of her short 30 day stay with the family “does not inspire confidence” in the allegations against them.
On the conspiracy charge, the judge observed that “except for bare statement, there is nothing on chargesheet to point out that the present petitioners had conspired,” and that the case appeared to be “a dispute between husband and wife” into which the mother-in-law and brother-in-law had been dragged “for no fault of theirs.”
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Holding that continuing the prosecution against them would amount to “abuse of process of law,” the court quashed the FIR against the surviving petitioners– the mother-in-law and the brother-in-law of the woman, while making clear that the observations would not bind the ongoing case against the accused husband himself, whose conduct the Canadian court had already commented upon.
