‘Not a crime if relationship doesn’t lead to marriage’: HC quashes rape case

That the relationship did not culminate in marriage may be a source of personal grievance, but the failure of love is not a crime, nor does the law transform disappointment into deception, the bench said

The Orissa high court has quashed rape charges filed by a woman who was in a relationship with a police sub-inspector for nine years, observing that non-culmination of the relationship into marriage may be a source of personal grievance but not a crime.

The high court said the presumption that a woman engages in intimacy only as a prelude to marriage, that her consent to one act is but a silent pledge to another, is a vestige of patriarchal thought, not a principle of justice (Orissa high court website)

“The law does not extend its protection to every broken promise nor does it impose criminality upon every failed relationship. The petitioner and the prosecutrix entered into a relationship in 2012, when both were competent, consenting adults, capable of making their own choices, of exercising their own will, and of shaping their own futures. That the relationship did not culminate in marriage may be a source of personal grievance, but the failure of love is not a crime, nor does the law transform disappointment into deception,” justice Sanjeeb Panigrahi said in his February 14 verdict.

The relationship started in 2012 when the two were pursuing a computer course in Sambalpur district.

The woman first accused him of rape in a complaint to the sub divisional judicial magistrate in Bolangir district in 2021, accusing the police officer of rape on the false promise of marriage. She also said he had administered emergency contraceptives to her to prevent pregnancy.

“The law does not extend its protection to every broken promise nor does it impose criminality upon every failed relationship. The man and the woman entered into a relationship in 2012, when both were competent, consenting adults, capable of making their own choices, of exercising their own will, and of shaping their own futures,” the court said.

The high court said there was an urgent need to disentangle the constructs of sex and marriage, both in our legal system and in the social consciousness that shapes it.

“The concept of sexual autonomy, a woman’s right to make independent and uncoerced decisions about her body, sexuality, and relationships, has been a site of continuous contestation within feminist philosophy. Marriage, in a patriarchal society, has been reduced to a mere performative act, reinforcing the notion that female sexuality must be bound to male commitment. It is a legal construct, a deliberate compact between two individuals who elect to bind their futures together under the sanction of law. It is not the inexorable destination of passion, nor the predetermined consequence of intimacy. To conflate the two is to imprison human relationships within archaic expectations, to deny individuals, especially women, their right to autonomy, to choice, to the pursuit of desire unshackled by social decree,” justice Panigrahi said.

The judge added: “Feminist philosophy has long waged battle against the tyranny of expectation, the insidious notion that a woman’s sexual agency is valid only when tethered to marriage. Simone de Beauvoir, a renowned French existentialist philosopher, feminist theorist, and writer, in her seminal work The Second Sex, unmasked the historical subjugation embedded in this expectation. It is this fiction of destiny that the law must resist. The presumption that a woman engages in intimacy only as a prelude to marriage, that her consent to one act is but a silent pledge to another, is a vestige of patriarchal thought, not a principle of justice. The law cannot lend itself to such a perversion of choice, where failed relationships become grounds for legal redress, and disappointment is cloaked in the language of deception.”