NEW DELHI:
The Supreme Court has said that physical intimacy in a consensual relationship cannot be retrospectively branded as rape merely because the relationship subsequently turns sour or breaks down.
A Bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and R Mahadevan made the observation while discharging a Kerala-based man, Santosh Kumar NP, of charges of rape and cheating. The court stressed the need to distinguish between cases where consent is obtained through deliberate deception or fraud from those involving retrospective regret over consensual acts after a relationship ends.
The case arose from a woman’s allegation that the accused had concealed his earlier marriage and led her to believe that she was entering into a lawful marital relationship. The woman, who was divorced from an earlier marriage, alleged that they had lived together from 1996 to 2003 after getting married in Mysore, while his previous marriage was still subsisting.
The Bench observed that the mere fact that a relationship had become acrimonious could not, by itself, convert earlier consensual intimacy into a criminal offence. It also cautioned against using criminal law to settle personal disputes, while emphasising that charges of rape must be reserved for cases involving sexual violence, coercion or manipulation of consent.
The court said the entire relationship must be examined holistically rather than judging the nature of consent solely from the way it ended. It warned that converting every failed consensual relationship into a rape case could dilute the gravity of the offence and cause serious prejudice to the accused.