HC rescues woman employee from fraudulent marriage

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

The Madras High Court has come to the rescue of a woman who was fraudulently shown as being married to a former colleague.

The court found that a human resources executive in a private firm, in which the woman was employed as an engineer, used documents she had signed for some other purpose to register a fictional marriage between them. The executive had obtained her signatures on some papers in the guise of giving her a transfer from Thoothukudi to Chennai.

Allowing a writ petition filed by the woman, Justice M. Govindaraj quashed the registration of the supposed “marriage” and directed the Marriage Registrar, Chennai North, to “delete, cancel and remove” the entry made on September 15, 2014 in the Marriage Register.

The judge said it would be “unfair” to direct the petitioner to go to a Family Court seeking declaration of the marriage as null and void since it would cause further mental agony to the woman who was already in distress.

He noted that the woman was recruited as a Trainee Engineer in a private power plant in Thoothukudi in 2014 and was desperate to get transferred to its Chennai office. The HR Executive, T. Mohamed Fahmi, took her to the company’s office at Egmore in Chennai and obtained signatures in a couple of papers on the promise of finding a suitable position for her.

Subsequently, he made a volte face, citing lack of vacancies in Chennai. The petitioner left the job in March 2015 as she was unable to cope with the work pressure in Thoothukudi.

It was only before the Assembly elections in May this year that the petitioner found that her name had been included in the voters’ list of Srivaikuntam constituency in Thoothukudi district, mentioning her as the wife of Fahmi.

On enquiry, she came to know that he had included her name as his wife in his passport as well as family card.

Further, probe revealed that such documents had been created on the basis of the registration of a ‘marriage’ that took place between them in the office of Chennai-based advocate K. Ameer Batcha and duly registered with the Registrar of Marriages.

Shocked over such allegations, the High Court on August 2 included the advocate as well as the Bar Council of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry as respondents to the case and ordered notices to them.

The Bar Council rushed to the court to inform that advocate Batcha “was a person known for his chamber activities of solemnizing and registering the marriages and that he had solemnized lot of marriages at the chambers and acted as a priest contrary to the oath taken before the Bar Council.”

However, neither the HR Executive Fahmi nor the lawyer Batcha entered appearance despite the court serving notice on them and the Bar Council contended that they would not appear before the court since the registration was per se illegal.

The petitioner’s counsel brought it to the notice of the court that the marriage had been reported to have been performed under Section 7A of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 which was a special provision with respect to solemnisation of self respect marriages between Hindu couples and not applicable to couples professing different religions.

HR executive of a firm she worked for obtained her signatures in a devious way and registered the marriage







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