New Delhi: In a major ruling, the Supreme Court said that physical relationships with consent in a live-in relationship between partners does not amount to rape. The apex court said that if a man fails to marry a woman with whom he had consensual sex in a live-in relationship, the woman cannot claim being rape.
The top court pronounced the verdict while quashing a case lodged by a Maharashtra-based nurse against a doctor, who were in a live-in relationship “for quite some time”.
“Thus, there is a clear distinction between rape and consensual sex. The court, in such cases, must very carefully examine whether the complainant had actually wanted to marry the victim or had mala fide motives and had made a false promise to this effect only to satisfy his lust, as the latter falls within the ambit of cheating or deception,” a bench of Justices AK Sikri and S Abdul Nazeer said in a recent verdict.
The bench also said that if “the accused has not made the promise with the sole intention to seduce the prosecutrix (woman) to indulge in sexual acts, such an act would not amount to rape”.
However, a case is inevitable in a situation where the complainant “agrees to have sexual intercourse on account of her love and passion for the accused and not solely on account of the misconception created by accused, or where an accused, on account of circumstances which he could not have foreseen or which were beyond his control, was unable to marry her despite having every intention to do. Such cases must be treated differently.”
The verdict is a major relief to men wrongly accused of rape in case they fail to marry their live-in partner due to circumstances beyond their control. In the past, there have been several cases where women have alleged being raped by their live-in partners if they failed to marry.
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Ms Kalinga