Best Morning v. Nirmalendu, 2 June 1987
Annual Review of Population Law 14: 28
1987
ISSN/ISBN: 0364-3417 PMID: 12346669 Document Number: 383883
The parties were a husband and wife, married according to Christian rites, who separated after the husband told the wife that there was no possibility of their having children because he had undergone a vasectomy prior to the marriage. The wife sought a declaration, unopposed by the husband, that the marriage was null and void on the grounds that the husband was impotent and that he had deceived her into marrying him. Although the Court found that under the Indian Divorce Act, 1869, the husband was not impotent, but rather sterile, it nonetheless upheld a lower court order dissolving the marriage under the Act on the ground of fraud. In its decision it pointed out that impotence meant the inability to perform the sexual act, not inability to procreate.