The Supreme Court has drawn a firm line between a broken relationship and a criminal offence, quashing a rape case against a Chhattisgarh man accused of exploiting a married woman on the promise of marriage.
At the heart of the dispute was a claim that a long-term intimate relationship was built on an assurance that could never legally materialise. The Court found that reality impossible to ignore.
A Bench of Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan held that a promise of marriage made to a woman whose first marriage was still legally intact is void from the outset. Such a promise, the Court said, cannot form the foundation of a charge of repeated rape under Section 376(2)(n) of the Indian Penal Code.
The Court reiterated a settled principle: a relationship that involves consent does not automatically turn criminal simply because a promise to marry later falls apart. For it to amount to rape, the promise must have been false from the very beginning—made only to secure consent, with no intention of being honoured—and it must be the decisive factor behind that consent.
In this case, the complainant alleged that the relationship began in September 2022 and continued for over two years, during which she became pregnant and later underwent an abortion. After tensions with the man’s family escalated, she approached the police in early 2025, accusing him of repeatedly raping her on the pretext of marriage.
The Supreme Court, however, focused on a critical and undisputed fact: throughout the alleged relationship, the woman’s divorce proceedings were still pending. Under the Hindu Marriage Act, a second marriage during the subsistence of a first is void in law.
That legal impossibility, the Court said, fundamentally altered the nature of the allegation.
It was “difficult to accept,” the judges observed, that an educated adult—aware of her own marital status—could claim to have been misled into believing that a lawful marriage was immediately possible. Both parties knew the legal position, and the promise, even if made, could not have been fulfilled at the time.
The judgment found no indication of a calculated deception designed solely to obtain sexual consent. Instead, it described the situation as a consensual relationship between two adults that later deteriorated.
“This is a relationship gone sour,” the Court remarked, adding that personal fallouts should not automatically be converted into criminal prosecutions.
With those observations, the Supreme Court set aside the earlier refusal to intervene and brought the criminal proceedings to an end, allowing the appeal and closing the case.
