Unit 4: Offence Relating to Marriage — Types of Punishable Marriage: Bigamy; Child Marriage; Incestuous Marriage; Fraudulent Marriage
1. The Framework: Marriage as a Criminal-Law Object
Marriage — the family-law institution (Family Law, Semester 4’s civil side) — is also a criminal law’s protected status: the state polices who may marry, how many may be married, and on what truth the marriage rests. The Code’s marriage-offence chapter punishes marriages that violate the statutory conditions (the marriage age — twenty years for both parties in Nepal, the world’s highest uniform bar, the national policy choice); the monogamy condition; the prohibited-degrees (consanguinity) condition; and the consent-through-fraud condition. The design logic: the marriage’s validity (civil) and the marriage’s criminality (penal) — two tracks, one institution (a void marriage’s parties may also be criminals; but the crime and the nullity are distinct questions — the exam’s recurring distinction).
2. Bigamy (Dui Bihe)
Definition: marrying again while the first spouse is alive and the first marriage subsists — the monogamy rule’s breach (Nepal’s statutory monogamy: the 2020 Ain’s abolition of polygamy’s old regimes, the Code’s monogamous marriage code). Elements:
- A valid prior marriage (the first marriage must subsist — the void-ab-initio first marriage’s paradox: the “bigamist” whose first marriage never existed);
- A second marriage ceremony/registration while the first subsists;
- The second marriage’s own form (the ceremony or registration constituting “marriage” for the offence — the unregistered-ritual marriage’s sufficiency for criminality, the courts recognizing the socially-performed marriage though unregistered);
- Knowledge of the first marriage’s subsistence (the mistake-of-fact defence: the spouse reasonably believed dead/divorced).
The statutory exceptions (the Code’s scheme, by principle): the first marriage’s dissolution (divorce/death); the first spouse’s whereabouts unknown for the statutory period (the deserted spouse’s statutory release — the “not heard of for the defined years” exception); the first marriage’s judicial nullity.
The gendered history (the analysis that earns marks): the Ain-era polygamy’s asymmetry (the husband’s conditional second marriage permitted under the old law’s strictures; the wife’s never) abolished in the reform era — the Code’s equal monogamy; the bigamy prosecution’s sociology (the second-family cases, the deserted-first-wife complaints, the property-and-maintenance drivers behind the charges).
This is a preview. The complete Criminal Law-II notes — full unit, Exam Focus box and model questions — are in the PDF / full version. Get the complete notes →