Latest Judgement

This article has been researched and written by Advocate Aarun Chanda, who practices divorce law in Mumbai and Pune. It is intended solely for academic purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. The views expressed are personal. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified lawyer or advocate specializing in divorce cases for professional legal guidance.

A client once told me, quite seriously, that his passport had become the most contested document in his marriage — more fought-over than the flat in Anna Nagar, more fought-over than the gold that had vanished into somebody’s locker after the wedding. He was not exaggerating by much. He had a research fellowship waiting for him abroad, a visa stamped and ready, and a domestic violence case freshly filed by his wife sitting at the Family Court in Coimbatore. The Regional Passport Office, on hearing of the pending proceeding, wrote to him with the brisk finality of a department that has never once in its history second-guessed itself: kindly surrender your passport.

He sat across from me holding that letter the way people hold hospital reports — as though reading it more slowly might change the diagnosis. “I have not been convicted of anything,” he said. “I have not even been accused of a crime, technically. I have been accused of being difficult to live with. Is that now an extraditable offence against my own government?”

It wasn’t, as it turns out, and the Madras High Court has just said so in terms clear enough to frame and hang in the waiting room of every family court in the state.

1. The Case That Answered the Question

The matter came up before Justice V. Lakshminarayanan as R. Ramaswamy v. The Regional Passport Office and Another, decided this August. The petitioner, much like my own client, had a domestic violence complaint pending against him, filed by his wife, while proceedings between the couple were also underway before the Family Court at Coimbatore. He wished to travel abroad to pursue a Post-Doctoral Fellowship — the sort of opportunity that does not politely wait for domestic disputes to resolve themselves — and had a valid passport in hand. The Passport Office, however, treated the pending domestic violence case as though it were a criminal prosecution and directed him to return his passport, effectively grounding him.

He came to the High Court under Article 227 read with the criminal jurisdiction of the Court, asking it to set aside that order. And the Court, without much hesitation, did precisely that.

2. READING THE ORDER

Justice Lakshminarayanan’s reasoning rested on a distinction that ought to be obvious but is routinely lost on administrative authorities in a hurry to be seen doing something: not everything that walks into a Magistrate’s court dressed like a criminal case actually is one. The Bench held that a proceeding under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 remains, in the Court’s own words, “one of civil flavour” right up until it reaches the stage of Section 31 of the Act — the provision that punishes the breach of a protection order with imprisonment up to a year or a fine up to Rs. 20,000, or both. Until that breach occurs and that specific machinery is invoked, the Court said plainly, the proceeding “is not a criminal proceeding.”

That single sentence carried the whole case. The power vested in passport authorities to impound or demand the return of a passport exists, the Court reasoned, to ensure that a person facing genuine criminal proceedings does not use foreign travel to dodge the reach of an Indian court. It is a tool for keeping an accused within jurisdiction, not a general-purpose leash to be applied whenever a marriage turns litigious. Since the domestic violence complaint against the petitioner had not travelled anywhere near Section 31 — nobody had breached a protection order, because no protection order had even been passed and violated — there was, in the Court’s assessment, no criminal proceeding to speak of, and therefore no legitimate basis to hold his passport hostage to it. The order of the Regional Passport Office was accordingly set aside, and the words the Bench chose were unambiguous: “on account of the dispute between the spouses, the husband or the wife cannot be denied the right to travel abroad.”

Notice, incidentally, that the Court did not write this as a husband’s privilege. It applies with equal force the other way — to a wife facing a domestic violence counter-complaint, or any other proceeding of civil character brought against her by an aggrieved husband. The ruling protects a principle, not a gender.

3. The Civil Character of the DV Act — Not a New Idea, But a Necessary Reminder

None of this emerged from thin air. Madras has, for some years now, been quietly building a fairly coherent body of law on exactly this question of what a domestic violence proceeding actually is. In Dr. P. Pathmanathan v. V. Monica, a Full Bench of this very High Court settled a long-running disagreement between judges by holding that proceedings under the DV Act are predominantly civil in character, notwithstanding that they are conducted before a Magistrate and dressed in the procedural robes of the CrPC. The Full Bench was explicit that the proceeding turns criminal only at the point where Sections 31 or 33 come into play — that is, when a protection order or the directions of a Protection Officer are actually breached. Everything before that — the protection orders, the residence orders, the monetary reliefs, the custody arrangements, the compensation — belongs, in substance, to the civil side of the law, however criminal the setting might look to someone unfamiliar with the statute.

The Supreme Court has walked the same path. In Kunapareddy v. Kunapareddy Swarna Kumari, it held that filing an application under Section 12 of the DV Act cannot be equated with lodging a criminal complaint or setting a prosecution in motion — a holding significant enough that the Court, in Kamatchi v. Lakshmi Narayanan in 2022, relied on it (alongside the Madras High Court’s own reasoning in Pathmanathan) to conclude that the limitation period under Section 468 of the CrPC, which governs criminal complaints, simply has no application to DV Act proceedings. You cannot borrow a criminal limitation clock for a civil remedy. The two run on different tracks, and courts across the country have been saying so with increasing consistency.

Ramaswamy, then, is not a doctrinal leap. It is what happens when this settled civil characterisation of the DV Act meets an entirely different statute — the Passports Act, 1967 — and an administrative authority that had not quite worked out how the two are supposed to talk to each other. The Passport Office’s power to impound or revoke, found in Section 10(3) of that Act, is squarely tied to a person facing proceedings before a criminal court in India in respect of an alleged offence. Apply a civil proceeding to that provision, and the machinery simply has no gears to turn. The Madras High Court’s real contribution in Ramaswamy was less about domestic violence law and more about making sure one statute did not accidentally swallow another because a passport clerk found a mention of “Magistrate” and stopped reading any further.

4. WHY THE RIGHT TO TRAVEL MATTERS AS MUCH AS THE RIGHT TO PROTECTION

It would be a mistake to read this judgment as somehow diminishing the seriousness of domestic violence complaints, and I don’t think that is what the Bench intended, nor is it how I would advise a client to read it. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act remains a vital piece of social legislation, and nothing in Ramaswamy dilutes a wife’s right to seek protection, residence, maintenance, or compensation. What the judgment does is refuse to let a civil remedy be weaponised, even unintentionally, into a travel ban.

This matters because the right to travel abroad has occupied a settled and rather elevated place in our constitutional imagination since the Supreme Court’s decision in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, where the right to go abroad was recognised as an inseparable part of personal liberty under Article 21 — a right that cannot be curtailed except by a procedure that is fair, just, and reasonable, not by administrative shortcut. A pending domestic dispute, however bitterly contested, is not by itself the kind of “procedure established by law” that Article 21 contemplates as sufficient to ground a citizen. If it were, half the litigating spouses of this country — and I say this from genuine professional experience, not rhetorical flourish — would never see the outside of an airport departure lounge again.

There is also a quieter fairness argument buried in this order that I find myself returning to. Domestic litigation, almost by design, takes years. A Family Court matter in Mumbai, a DV complaint running its own parallel course, cross-petitions, appeals — none of this resolves itself in a hurry, and it should not have to, because these are serious matters deserving careful adjudication. But a career, a fellowship, an ageing parent abroad, a job that will not hold itself open indefinitely — these operate on entirely different clocks. To tell a litigant that his professional or personal life must remain frozen in place until a marital dispute concludes, possibly a decade hence, is not protecting anyone. It is simply punishing patience.

5. A CLOSING THOUGHT

I think often, in this line of work, about how the law is forced to hold two truths at once: that domestic violence is real, under-reported, and deserving of a swift and serious institutional response; and that the machinery built to deliver that response must not, through carelessness or excess caution, start behaving like a punishment handed out before any wrongdoing has actually been established. The Madras High Court, in Ramaswamy, did the unglamorous but essential work of holding both truths at once. It did not ask whether the wife’s complaint was genuine or exaggerated — that question remains entirely alive before the appropriate forum, exactly where it belongs. It asked only whether the mere existence of a civil proceeding could justify confiscating a citizen’s liberty to leave the country, and it answered, correctly, that it could not.

That, to me, is the rule of law doing precisely what it is meant to do — not choosing between a husband and a wife, not weighing whose grievance feels more sympathetic on a given afternoon, but insisting that every exercise of state power trace itself back to a specific legal provision that actually authorises it. A passport is not surrendered because a marriage is unhappy. It is surrendered, if at all, because a specific law says so in specific circumstances — and until that threshold is met, the citizen keeps his ticket, keeps his fellowship, and keeps his liberty, exactly as the Constitution intended.

Seeking expert legal guidance?- Contact The Divorce Law Firm today.