New Delhi: A married woman who enters into an extra-marital relationship cannot claim that she was raped if her partner refuses to marry her after consensual sex, the Supreme Court has held.
The Court set aside a rape case filed on the allegation of a false promise of marriage, observing that the dispute arose from a soured consensual relationship rather than criminal offence.
The bench, comprising Justice B V Nagarathna and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, ruled that the matter was essentially personal in nature and should not have led to criminal proceedings, as reported by News18.
Both individuals ought to have shown restraint instead of drawing the state into a private conflict, the Court remarked.
An FIR was registered in February 2025 in the Bilaspur district. The accused moved the Supreme Court after the Chhattisgarh High Court refused to cancel the proceedings in March 2025.
Both parties were practising lawyers, the Court noted. The complainant was a 33-year-old married woman and mother of a minor child. Her marriage was still legally valid at the time the alleged incidents took place, the bench pointed out.
“It has been time and again settled by this Court that the mere fact that the parties indulged in physical relations pursuant to a promise to marry will not amount to a rape in every case,” the bench observed.
“The facts of the present case unmistakably indicate towards a classic case of a consensual relationship turning acrimonious,” it added.
There is a growing pattern where broken relationships are turned into criminal complaints, the judges observed. The courts must carefully separate genuine cases from disputes arising out of disagreements between consenting adults, the bench stressed.
Since the woman’s divorce proceedings were pending, she could not legally marry another person, the Court pointed out.
“The law prohibits bigamous unions and therefore, disallows parties from entering into a second marriage during the subsistence of their first marriage,” it was observed.
The Court proceeded to quash both the FIR and all related proceedings.
