Cuttack: The Orissa High Court quashed rape charges against a man accused of having sexual relations with a woman for 9 years under the ‘false’ promise of marriage’.
The single bench of Justice Sanjeeb Kumar Panigrahi said that non-culmination of the relationship into marriage may be a source of personal grievance, while asserting that consensual relations between adults cannot be called a crime. “The law does not extend its protection to every broken promise, nor does it impose criminality upon every failed relationship. 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,” he observed.
Justice Panigrahi instead called for scrutiny of automatic criminalisation of failed relationships under the guise of false promise of marriage. “The assumption that every physical relationship between a man and a woman carries the implicit condition of matrimony is not a principle of law but a vestige of control.”
The February 14 order, which was uploaded on February 21, also stated that the man cannot be called a rapist for having consensual sexual relations, “when both were competent, consenting adults, capable of making their own choices, of exercising their own will, and of shaping their own futures”, just because the relationship did not result in marriage.
The court’s intervention came in response to a petition filed on November 25 last year challenging an FIR filed by the woman at Balangir Town police station in 2021. She had lodged the complaint after the man failed to appear on the scheduled date for the registration of their marriage. The woman claimed that he had ‘married’ her in a temple and was continuing a sexual relationship with her for years.
