India's top court decriminalizes adultery

Published on 28-Sep-2018

Khushboo Razdan

Just three weeks after decriminalizing gay sex, India's top court struck down the Victorian adultery law on Thursday.

"The husband is not the master of the wife" ruled India's top court while abolishing a 158-year-old British-era law that punished a married man for the offence of adultery if he had sexual relations with a married woman "without the consent of her husband."

Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code punished a man who has an affair with a woman without the consent or connivance of her husband; with up to five years in jail and women could neither file a complaint nor be held liable for adultery. Instead, the man was considered to be a seducer.

In 1954, the court upheld adultery as a crime arguing "it is commonly accepted that it is the man who is the seducer and not the woman."

In the landmark judgment Chief Justice Dipak Misra said that while it could be grounds for civil issues like divorce, "it cannot be a criminal offence."

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