Failed relationships cannot automatically lead to rape charges: Supreme Court

New Delhi: Concerned over the rising trend of criminal cases being filed after relationships fail, the Supreme Court on Friday said that physical intimacy during good times cannot later be branded as rape merely because the relationship soured or broke down.

A bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and R Mahadevan, which discharged a Kerala-based man of charges of rape and cheating, said there was a need to distinguish between cases in which sexual consent is legally void from the outset because it was obtained through deliberate deception and fraud, and those in which a person experiences retrospective regret over past consensual acts simply because a relationship has ended.

“In such cases, physical intimacy that occurred during the currency of a functioning relationship cannot be retrospectively branded as an act of rape merely because the relationship soured and no longer subsists,” the bench said.

Such reflections in hindsight, on their own, are unfortunate and cannot turn a consensual relationship into a crime or set the criminal justice system’s wheels in motion in a manner that deprives the accused of his liberty and reputation.

“Such an approach denudes the man of any agency entirely, as the mere fact of being in a consensual relationship at one point would bind him to it entirely for fear of being accused of rape at a subsequent point of time,” the top court said.

“In such a scenario, can it be said that the man has no right to withdraw from the relationship? Can the decision be termed deceit or fraud? Clearly not,” it said.

The court has time and again witnessed the disturbing trend of failed relationships being converted into criminal cases, it added.

Cautioning that the charge of rape, being a heinous offence, must be reserved for situations involving actual sexual violence, coercion or manipulation of consent, the bench said, “When every consensual relationship which sours is converted into an accusation of rape, it dilutes the gravity of the offence alleged or rather negates the very allegation of crime.”

The accused in the case, Santosh Kumar N P, approached the top court challenging the Kerala High Court’s dismissal of his discharge petition and his plea for quashing the proceedings against him.

According to the prosecution, the victim alleged that the accused had concealed his earlier marriage and entered into a second marriage with her. He allegedly had sexual intercourse with her based on consent obtained through what the prosecution described as an “illegal marriage” secured by fraud.

The woman alleged that the accused cohabited with her deceitfully, inducing her to believe that their marriage was lawful. She alleged that he married her while his earlier marriage was still subsisting.

The woman, who had been divorced from an earlier marriage, had accused the man of rape, cheating and breach of trust. They cohabited from 1996 to 2003 after getting married in Mysore, she alleged.