‘Sex on pretext of marriage isn’t rape’

NEW DELHI: It is cheating and not rape when a man who has had sex with a woman after promising marriage does not keep his word, the supreme court has ruled.

The ruling was pronounced when the court partially allowed an appeal by one Deelip Singh who is charged with raping a woman on the pretext of marrying her.

A bench of Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice DK Jain held that a woman’s consent is vitiated if a man makes representation of marriage “deliberately” to “elicit” a woman’s assent for an intercourse.

To accuse a man of rape, it is necessary to establish that at the very inception of making a promise to marry, he did not “entertain the intention of marrying the woman”  and the promise was a mere hoax, the judges said.

“Then the consent ostensibly given by the victim will be of no avail to the accused to exculpate him from the ambit of Section 375 (rape) of the IPC,” the bench noted.

Judges also said that the lady involved in Singh’s case had accepted that she had consented to physical relations with him. She had also said that she was married to Singh.

If that was so, the judges said, Singh cannot be charged with rape, an offence that has been termed as “heinous” and which “kills the self of a victim”. The judges sent back Singh’s appeal to the Patna High Court that had refused to discharge him from the offence of rape.