A stranger to the marriage cannot call it void to keep her out of the house, the High Court holds

Faced with a claim that the widow’s marriage was bigamous and therefore void, the Court answers on standing rather than on Section 11 — the man who lived there had no locus to raise it, and the husband never did.

A man in possession of a house at Lucknow sued for an injunction to stay there. The woman who claimed the property as the widow of its lessee counter-claimed for a mandatory injunction letting her put her own lock on it. Both courts below decided for her. On 23 September 2026 Justice Prashant Kumar dismissed his second appeals.

The appeals were decided on eight substantial questions of law, and the one worth reporting is the second: whether the widow’s marriage was void under Section 5(i) read with Section 11 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, because it was solemnised while her earlier marriage subsisted.

The property and the paperwork

The house was originally acquired from the Lucknow Development Authority by a registered lease deed of March 1995. On the appellant’s own pleading the property was jointly purchased by Dr. Jagdamba Prasad Gupta and the respondent, and the lease deed was executed in their favour. A freehold deed followed later.

The respondent married Dr. Gupta, and on his death applied for mutation as his sole legal heir and successor. A succession certificate proceeding under Section 372 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 before the Civil Judge (Senior Division) at Azamgarh recognised her status.

The appellant’s suit, filed in 2008 at Malihabad, sought a permanent injunction. Her counter-claim sought a mandatory injunction permitting her to place her lock on the property.

Injunction without possession

The appellant’s first and third questions went together: could a mandatory injunction letting her lock the property be granted when she admittedly was not in possession and he was, and when she had not sued for possession?

The Court held the appellant had failed to establish any independent right in the property. He was there permissively. A person permitted to occupy is obliged not to obstruct or interfere with the owner’s lawful enjoyment, and having no independent right, he was under an obligation to restore it. The decree of mandatory injunction was held to accord with Supreme Court principle, and both questions were answered against him.

“Her marriage was void”

The second question is the one that would ordinarily attract attention. The appellant argued that the respondent could not be the legally wedded wife of Dr. Gupta because her marriage to him was solemnised during the subsistence of her earlier marriage to another man; that it was therefore void ab initio under Sections 5(i) and 11; and that she acquired no right in the estate. He added that the courts below had been perverse in relying on the Azamgarh succession order.

The Court declined to decide whether the marriage was void, and explained why it did not have to.

At the outset, it held, the appellant is a stranger to the matrimonial relationship and has no locus standi to challenge the respondent’s marital status in these proceedings. The Azamgarh order was passed by a competent court after considering the material before it, and cannot be called perverse merely because the appellant seeks to dispute it in collateral proceedings. He cannot be permitted to agitate an issue that does not arise for determination in this case.

The second strand of the reasoning is evidential and, for a property dispute, decisive. At the time the registered lease deed was executed, Dr. Gupta himself described the respondent as his wife. Throughout his lifetime he never took any step to dispute, cancel or challenge that document or her status, and initiated no proceedings questioning the marital relationship.

In those circumstances a stranger to the marriage cannot be permitted to question her status, or to challenge the rights flowing from those documents — particularly where he has no independent right of his own. The Court also invokes the estoppel statutorily recognised in Section 116 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, which it holds squarely applicable.

The second question was accordingly answered against the appellant.

Documents not put to admission and denial

The fourth question alleged that the courts below relied on documentary evidence never admitted or proved under Order VII Rule 14, Order VIII Rule 1A and Order XIII Rule 1 of the Code, and the corresponding General Civil Rules; that filing a document does not make it admissible; and that the concurrent findings were therefore perverse.

The answer was that the appellant had not identified which document was inadmissible, at what stage any objection to its admissibility was taken before the civil court, or what prejudice the irregularity caused. A vague and general allegation that documents were not subjected to admission and denial is insufficient to dislodge concurrent findings of fact. The objection was raised for the first time in second appeal, by a party who had participated below without objecting and allowed the documents to be considered.

What the registered deed could not do by itself

The judgment is not one-sided on the documents. It records that a registered lease deed, a succession certificate and a subsequent freehold deed could not, by themselves, confer an indefeasible title. The appellant’s difficulty was not that her paperwork was conclusive; it was that he had nothing of his own to set against it, and no standing to attack the status underlying it.

On the later questions the Court held the appellant could not be permitted to achieve indirectly what he is prohibited from doing directly, and could not bypass the statutory remedy of challenging the registered lease deed. The concurrent findings of both courts below were held to rest on a proper appreciation of the evidence.

The second appeals were dismissed, with the parties left to bear their own costs.