KUNDAN KUMARversusThe State of Bihar

            IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUDICATURE AT PATNA
                       CRIMINAL MISCELLANEOUS No.9931 of 2023
                Arising out of PS. Case No.-292 Year-2021 Thana- Kadamkuan District- Patna
     ======================================================
     KUNDAN KUMAR Son of Birendra Kumar Singh R/o A/18, R.B.I Staff
     Quarter, Road No. 10A Rajendra Nagar, P.S- Kadamkuan Dist- Patna

                                                                             ... ... Petitioner/s
                                                 Versus
1.    The State of Bihar
2.    Mabina Singh Wife of Kundan Kumar 10A, R.B.I. Staff Quarter, Rajendra
      Nagar, P.S- Kadamkuan, Distt- Patna permanent address R/V and PO Madra
      Road, Nawada, Dist- Nawada, Correct Address- d/o late Vinod Singh, R/o
      124 A , Ravindra Sarni, P.S- Jodda Sakho, Distt- Kolkata, West bengal

                                            ... ... Opposite Party/s
     ======================================================
     Appearance :
     For the Petitioner/s          :        Mr. N.K. Agrawal, Senior Advocate
                                            Mr. Amresh Kumar Sinha, Advocate
     For the State                 :        Mr. Pramod Kumar Pandey, APP.

     ======================================================
     CORAM: HONOURABLE MR. JUSTICE ANSUL
                           ORAL JUDGMENT

          Date : 22-06-2026

                     This petition under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha

     Sanhita, 2023 seeks the quashing of the cognizance order dated 29.04.2022

     passed by the learned Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate-X, Patna, taking

     cognizance of offences under Sections 498-A, 313, and 34 of the                     Indian

     Penal Code and Sections 3 and 4 of the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, in

     connection with Kadamkuan PS Case No. 292 of 2021. The informant Mabina

     Singh says she married the petitioner Kundan Kumar on 19.07.2019

     at     a     temple      in       Nawada   as    per     Hindu      rites   and     rituals,

     shifted thereafter to the RBI Staff Quarter at Rajendra Nagar, Patna, and was

     subjected to cruelty and dowry harassment, the forced termination of her

     pregnancies, physical assault on 03.04.2021, and eventual expulsion from the
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matrimonial home. The petitioner denies the marriage entirely. He says    the

informant, during the whole of this period, was a married woman living in

Kolkata as the wife of one Sanjeet Singh.

                2. On 19.11.2020, Mabina Singh walked into Lake Town

Police Station, Kolkata, and lodged a complaint that was registered as FIR

No. 204 of 2020 under Sections 406 and 506 of the Indian Penal Code. This

is Annexure 2. In that complaint, in the column for the name of her husband,

she entered the name Sanjeet Singh. The         grievance was that Sanjeet

Singh, having obtained a duplicate key to her almirah and locker, had

removed therefrom official cash of Rs. 2,30,000, personal cash of Rs.

40,000, gold jewellery, silver coins, a diamond mangalsutra, and other

valuables, and had then absconded; that he was threatening her; that she

feared for her life; that she was contemplating suicide on account of his

conduct. This complaint was lodged more than a year after the date on

which the informant now says she had already married the petitioner and

left for Patna to reside with him. The name of the petitioner does not appear

in the complaint. There is no suggestion in it that she had a husband other

than Sanjeet Singh.

                3.    Before examining the legal consequence, it is necessary

to understand the full shape of the informant's matrimonial history, because

it is that history which makes the present prosecution untenable from its

very foundation. Mabina Singh and Sanjeet Singh married on 06.05.2011 as

per Hindu rites and rituals. Their marriage broke down, and after a period of

separation they decided to dissolve it by mutual consent. They filed a joint

petition before the Principal Judge, Family Court, Calcutta, registered as

Matrimonial Suit No. 106 of 2019. The petition was filed on 11.07.2019,
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which was the very month and year in which the informant claims she had

contracted a fresh marriage with the petitioner at Nawada. The divorce

decree in that suit was not passed until 23.02.2021. On that date, the order

sheet of the Family Court records that Mabina Singh was personally present,

was examined as PW-1, and gave her evidence on affidavit. She received

the certified copy of the order on 09.03.2021. This decree is Annexure 3.

Annexure 4 is a leave and licence agreement dated 19.10.2019, executed in

respect of commercial premises in Kolkata in connection with a business in

which the informant had an interest; in that document, executed three

months after the alleged marriage at Nawada, the informant described

herself by her father's name and made no reference to the petitioner in any

capacity.

                4.    The picture that these three documents draw, placed

against the FIR in the present case, is one of complete internal contradiction.

On 11.07.2019, when the informant was supposedly newly married to the

petitioner and beginning her life at his home in Patna, she was

simultaneously standing before the Family Court at Calcutta and filing a

joint divorce petition from Sanjeet Singh, a man she continued to describe

as her husband. From that date until 23.02.2021, no court of competent

jurisdiction had dissolved that marriage. In November 2020, when by her

own account she had been the petitioner's wife for more than a year, she

described Sanjeet Singh as her husband to the Kolkata police and made no

mention of the petitioner's existence. Three months after the alleged

marriage at Nawada, in a commercial document signed in Kolkata, she

described herself by her father's name and left the petitioner's name out
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entirely. The silence across all three documents is not an omission or an

oversight. It is a pattern.

                5. A marriage solemnized during the subsistence of a prior

undissolved marriage is void under Section 11 read with Section 5(i) of the

Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. On 19.07.2019, the marriage between Mabina

Singh and Sanjeet Singh was alive. There was no divorce on that date, nor

for nearly twenty months thereafter. The claimed marriage with the

petitioner was therefore void ab initio. The Supreme Court examined the

interplay between the validity of a marriage and the application of Section

498-A IPC in Reema Aggarwal v. Anupam, (2004) 3 SCC 199, and held:

             "The concept of 'dowry' is intermittently
             linked with a marriage and the provisions of
             the Dowry Act apply in relation to marriages.
             If the legality of the marriage itself is an
             issue further legalistic problems do arise. If
             the validity of the marriage itself is under
             legal scrutiny, the demand of dowry in
             respect of an invalid marriage would be
             legally not recognizable. Even then the
             purpose for which Sections 498A and 304B
             IPC and Section 113B of the Indian Evidence
             Act were introduced cannot be lost sight of.
             Legislations enacted with some policy to
             curb and alleviate some public evil rampant
             in society and effectuate a definite public
             purpose or benefit positively requires to be
             interpreted with certain element of realism
             too and not merely pedantically or hyper
             technically. The obvious objective was to
             prevent harassment to a woman who enters
             into a marital relationship with a person and
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             later on, becomes a victim of the greed for
             money."


The Court extended this reasoning to hold that even where the marriage is

invalid, the expression 'husband' in Section 498-A ought to be construed to

cover a person who enters into a marital arrangement under a proclaimed or

feigned status of husband and then subjects the woman to cruelty:

             "It would be appropriate to construe the
              expression 'husband' to cover a person who
              enters into marital relationship and under
              the colour of such proclaimed or feigned
              status of husband subjects the woman
              concerned to cruelty or coerce her in any
              manner or for any of the purposes
              enumerated in the relevant provisions. Such
              an interpretation, known and recognized as
              purposive construction has to come into play
              in a case of this nature."


        6.    The ratio of Reema Aggarwal was fashioned for a different

fact situation, and it cannot be pressed into service here. In that case, the

woman was deceived; a man who already had a living wife led her into a

marital relationship without her knowledge of the impediment, and the

Court extended the protection of Section 498-A to her because the

legislative purpose of the provision was to protect women who enter

matrimonial relationships and then become victims of cruelty or dowry

demands. The present case does not answer that description. It is the

informant who, on 19.07.2019, had a living husband namely Sanjeet

Singh. She was a party to the undissolved marriage. She continued to hold

herself out as wife of Sanjeet Singh in Kolkata as late as November 2020,

even though she alleges that she was by then residing in Patna as the wife
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of petitioner, and she personally appeared before the Family Court at

Calcutta in February 2021 to complete the dissolution of a marriage whose

existence she never disclosed to the Kadamkuan police station or to this

court through the FIR. The purposive construction approved in Reema

Aggarwal was designed to protect a woman from a man's fraud; it was not

designed as a mechanism by which a person who herself had a living and

undissolved spouse on the date of the alleged second marriage could

invoke the penal law against the second man on the footing of a marriage

that the law regards as void.

                7.    In State of Haryana v. Bhajan Lal, 1992 Supp (1)

SCC 335, the Supreme Court enumerated the categories of cases in which

the power under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (now

Section 528 of the BNSS) may be exercised to prevent abuse of process

or to secure the ends of justice. Category (1) covers cases:

            "Where the allegations made in the First
            Information Report or the complaint, even
            if they are taken at their face value and
            accepted in their entirety do not prima
            facie constitute any offence or make out a
            case against the accused."
Even on the informant's own version of events, accepted in its entirety,

Section 498-A is not made out, because the condition precedent to the

offence, namely a valid marriage conferring the status of wife in the eyes

of law, is absent. The Court in Bhajan Lal also recognized, under category

(7), cases where a criminal proceeding is:

            "manifestly attended with mala fide
            and/or where the proceeding is
            maliciously instituted with an ulterior
            motive for wreaking vengeance on the
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            accused and with a view to spite him due
            to private and personal grudge."


The informant lodged the FIR on 21.06.2021, nearly four months after

she had personally appeared before the Family Court at Calcutta and

obtained her divorce from Sanjeet Singh, and without disclosing to the

Kadamkuan police, or anywhere in the FIR, the fact that she had been

pursuing Sanjeet Singh as her husband before the Kolkata police as

recently as November 2020. A complaint of this nature, resting upon a

marriage that was void from its inception under the informant's own

matrimonial history, was brought against petitioner standing at this

remove of time, and without any explanation for the contradictions that

her own documents create, satisfies this court that the present proceeding

falls within the category the Hon’ble Supreme Court identified.

                8. The Supreme Court's observations in Preeti Gupta v.

State of Jharkhand, (2010) 7 SCC 667, acquire particular force on the

facts of this case. The Court said:

            "It is a matter of common experience that
            most of these complaints under Section
            498-A IPC are filed in the heat of the
            moment over trivial issues without proper
            deliberations. We come across a large
            number of such complaints which are not
            even bona fide and are filed with oblique
            motives."
What the Court said next is no less important:

            "The tendency of implicating husband and all
            his immediate relations is also not
            uncommon. At times, even after the
            conclusion of criminal trial, it is difficult to
            ascertain the real truth. The courts have to be
            extremely careful and cautious in dealing with
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            these complaints and must take pragmatic
            realities into consideration while dealing with
            matrimonial cases."
The Court added:

            "It is also a matter of common knowledge that
            exaggerated versions of the incident are
            reflected in a large number of complaints. The
            tendency of over implication is also reflected
            in a very large number of cases. The criminal
            trials lead to immense sufferings for all
            concerned. Even ultimate acquittal in the trial
            may also not be able to wipe out the deep
            scars of suffering of ignominy. Unfortunately
            a large number of these complaints have not
            only flooded the courts but also have led to
            enormous social unrest affecting peace,
            harmony and happiness of the society. It is
            high time that the legislature must take into
            consideration the pragmatic realities and
            make suitable changes in the existing law."


        The person against whom these observations are made to operate

in the present case is a senior public servant against whom a complaint

has been filed by a woman who, by her own documentary trail, was

someone else's wife on the date she says she married him, and who

continued to hold herself out as someone else's wife for the better part of

two years thereafter.

                9.   There was no valid marriage. Where there is no valid

marriage, there is no wife in the eyes of law. Where there is no wife in

law, there is no husband in law within the meaning of Section 498-A IPC,

and the offence cannot be constituted however many of its other

ingredients are alleged. The petition is accordingly allowed. The

cognizance order dated 29.04.2022, passed by the learned Additional

Chief Judicial Magistrate-X, Patna, in connection with Kadamkuan PS
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Case No. 292 of 2021, is hereby quashed, and all proceedings consequent

upon and arising therefrom shall also stand quashed.




                                           (Ansul, J)
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