The Special Marriage Act, 1954 · Ch. II — SOLEMNIZATION OF SPECIAL MARRIAGES
Before the marriage is solemnized the parties and three witnesses shall, in the presence of the Marriage Officer, sign a declaration in the form specified in the Third Schedule to this Act, and the declaration shall be countersigned by the Marriage Officer.
Sections of the SMA are not classified one by one by any First Schedule. Part II of the First Schedule to the BNSS classifies offences under every other law by the punishment they carry — and the CRPC’s First Schedule sets out the same three bands.
If punishable with death, imprisonment for life, or imprisonment for more than 7 years.
If punishable with imprisonment for 3 years and upwards but not more than 7 years.
If punishable with imprisonment for less than 3 years or with fine only.
Read it against the punishment in the section above. Vidhara does not place a section in a band for you — that turns on the exact wording of its punishment, which is the section’s to say and not ours.
And a special or local law may provide otherwise: see BNSS section 5, which saves any special jurisdiction, power or procedure another law lays down.
Source & version
Official text: India Code (official) ↗
Official India Code text: The Special Marriage Act, 1954, English PDF (bitstream 123456789/1387/1/A1954-43E.pdf, 377,569 bytes, sha256 8edbdc1c6178de27...) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-08-03. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and the @nexlex/ingest inline parser. This PDF prints its amendment footnotes at body height, so sections 3 to 7 were re-extracted from the source line stream and their numbering restored (D-058). Automated parse; footnotes and amendment history excluded. Spot-verified against the PDF; full clause-level proofread pending.
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