Lawmatters.in

Adultery was made a crime under India’s current legal system during the time of the Raj itself. Based on the idea that a wife belonged to her husband in the most literal sense of the word, the Indian Penal Code allowed husbands to choose to have criminal proceedings initiated against those men with whom their wives committed adultery since those men had laid claim over the ‘property’ which did not belong to them.

After independence, the law was challenged in a series of decisions, but the Courts upheld its validity and said that not only was the law constitutional but that it was also fair not to proceed against an adulterous wife through the Indian Penal Code. The rationale behind this changed though; wives were seen as being innocent and as requiring protection. Also, the courts ruled that the provisions of criminal law were not intended to be used by one spouse against the other.

Given current circumstances, and considering that Victorian England along with its moral code no longer exists, one would imagine that adultery should not be a crime. However, it has been widely reported that contrary to attempting to decriminalise adultery, the Government has been trying to garner opinions to see if and how the law can beamended to make wives punishable for the offence of adultery as well.

A number of activists have opposed this move for reasons ranging from their not believing that women should be made accountable considering that they are hardly in powerful socio-economic positions to not believing that adultery should be a crime at all.

It isn’t entirely clear why the Government is concentrating on making the criminal provisions dealing with adultery gender-neutral instead of focussing on making adultery merely a civil wrong. Civil wrongs do not leave people in gaol, crimes can.

*IPC section 497: Whoever has consensual sexual intercourse with a wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, is guilty of adultery.”