How women reacted to Delhi High Court’s split verdict on marital rape

The Delhi High Court delivered a split verdict on Wednesday on a batch of petitions seeking to make marital rape a crime. While one of the judges favoured striking down the provision of the law that provides exemption, the other held it was not unconstitutional.

On the hotly-debated question of criminalising marital rape, the Delhi High Court delivered a split verdict on Wednesday. The court was hearing a batch of petitions challenging an exception under rape laws that exempts men who have non-consensual sex with their wives from criminal prosecution if the woman is not a minor.

While Justice Shakdher, who headed the division bench, favoured striking down the marital rape exception for being "unconstitutional" and said it would be "tragic if a married woman's call for justice is not heard even after 162 years" since the enactment of IPC, Justice Shankar said the exception under the rape law is not "unconstitutional and was based on an intelligible differentia".

Reacting to the court’s verdict, activist Ratnaboli Ray said, “As an activist I feel outraged by this comment by a judge. This constant and forceful negation to acknowledge marital rape as a crime, the legal system reiterates that it is a wife's duty to have sex with her husband. This also reminds us that women's consent, which at the heart of right to life, autonomy and bodily integrity can be signed away with the institution of marriage.”

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Speaking to India Today, Sreemoyee Piu Kundu, an author, also said that women need to have autonomy over their bodies.

“Any act of sexual nature which doesn’t involve the implicit consent of a woman constitutes rape. The laws on rape have been amended and today, if a woman changes her mind midway during sex, then it is considered rape if the man still imposes and forces himself upon her,” Sremoyee Piu Kundu said.

She added, “India should immediately criminalize marital rape. This association of providing sex to the husband as one of the duties of a wife is not just regressive, but also barbaric. And justifying it through religion, because marriage has a social and religious context, and saying that it is the ‘dharma’ of the wife to provide sex to the husband is absolutely prehistoric and barbaric. Women should have autonomy over their bodies and complete agency over what they wish to be done to them.