Panaji: The Bombay high court on Monday directed the civil registrar of Salcete to register the marriage of an Indian man and a Russian divorcee according to the name in her passport, which contains her ex-husband’s surname.The couple had approached the HC after the civil registrar refused to register their marriage, as the woman continues to use her ex-husband’s surname. The registrar had held that the 43-year-old would need to use her maiden name as stated in her birth certificate instead.All the woman’s official documents, including her passport, carry her ex-husband’s surname. Her marriage was dissolved in 2012 in Russia.The division bench of Justices Valmiki Menezes and Amit Jamsandekar quashed the order of the registrar.“There’s nothing in Article 43 that acts as a prohibition to a divorced spouse from using the other spouse’s surname, and in this case, there’s a divorce decree produced where there is no such prohibition and claim at the behest of the ex-husband of the petitioner,” the court held. “So also, civil registrars are not vested with powers to refuse registration of a civil marriage using the provisions of Article 43 to claim there is such an embargo on use of an ex-spouse’s surname.”The HC quashed and set aside the objections raised by the Salcete civil registrar as “arbitrary and contrary to law”, and directed the registrar to register the marriage with her name as it is on her passport, and complete the process within a week. It also directed the National Informatics Centre to keep its portal open to accept the uploaded form with the woman’s name as it stands in her passport, in the event of her facing any technical difficulty.
