CONSENT DOES NOT EXPIRE AT THE ALTAR: THE CASE FOR CRIMINALISING MARITAL RAPE IN INDIA

Abstract

This article examines Exception 2 to Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, which exempts a husband from criminal liability for rape committed upon his wife. It argues that this exception is constitutionally unsustainable, morally indefensible, and practically harmful. The article traces the historical origins of the marital rape exception, examines the legislative and judicial landscape in India, analyses the constitutional grounds for striking it down, evaluates the inadequacy of existing remedies, and draws upon international precedent and treaty obligations to make the case that the criminalisation of marital rape is not merely a legal reform; it is a constitutional imperative.

I. Introduction

“Not criminalising marital rape does not save a marriage. It only saves the perpetrator.” (Palki Sharma)

In 1736, Sir Matthew Hale, Chief Justice of England, declared that a husband cannot be guilty of rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife: “for by their mutual matrimonial consent, she hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”[1] Nearly three centuries later, this discredited dictum of a long-dead colonial jurist still silently governs the conjugal lives of hundreds of millions of Indian women. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, enacted as a decolonised and progressive replacement of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), quietly carried forward this very exception under Section 63. During the parliamentary deliberations, the proposal to criminalise marital rape was turned down on the grounds that marriage is a sacred institution and that legal intervention would lead to the breakdown of marriages.[2]

The proponents of the status quo argued that India should take pride in its culture of low divorce rates, overlooking the reality that many marriages survive only because women silently endure violence and abuse. This culture of silence, tolerance, and compromise is often propagated to safeguard the honour and values of the Indian family, even when the hidden cost includes incest, violence, and suicide. Furthermore, fierce lobbying by men’s groups, citing the alleged misuse of domestic violence laws, has created a narrative that penal law against marital rape would be similarly abused. Consequently, Exception 2 to Section 63 of the BNS remains a legal shield, declaring that sexual acts by a man with his own wife, provided she is not under eighteen years of age, do not constitute rape. This institution of marriage, it would appear, remains a licence for sexual exploitation.

India thus finds itself in increasingly isolated company. The United Kingdom, the very jurisdiction from which this exception was imported, abolished it in 1991 through the House of Lords’ landmark ruling in R v. R, later codified under the Sexual Offences Act, 2003. The United States criminalised marital rape across all fifty states by 1993. Yet India, a constitutional republic that guarantees every person the right to equality, dignity, privacy, and bodily autonomy, continues to deny a married woman the most elementary of rights: the right to say no to her husband.

This article argues that Exception 2 to Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita is constitutionally unsustainable, morally indefensible, and practically harmful. It traces the historical origins of the marital rape exception, examines the legislative and judicial landscape in India, analyses the constitutional grounds for striking it down, evaluates the inadequacy of existing remedies, and draws upon international precedent and treaty obligations to make the case that the criminalisation of marital rape is not merely a legal reform; it is a constitutional imperative.

II. Facade of Reform: From IPC to BNS

The marital rape exception is not buried in obscure legislative text. It sits openly at the heart of India’s primary criminal statute, functioning as an explicit grant of immunity to husbands. Understanding its precise statutory location and evolution is necessary to appreciate both its reach and its vulnerability to constitutional challenge.

Under the Indian Penal Code, 1860, Section 375 defined rape in expansive terms, encompassing all forms of non-consensual sexual intercourse with a woman. Exception 2[3] of that provision, however, carved out a categorical exclusion: sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, was not rape. The provision was a direct transplant of Hale’s doctrine into codified law; consent was manufactured by marriage, irrevocable and perpetual.

The first judicial intervention came in Independent Thought v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 800,[4] where the Supreme Court partially read down the exception, holding that sexual intercourse with a minor wife below the age of eighteen constituted rape regardless of the marital exception. This partial correction acknowledged implicitly that the philosophical basis of the exception (implied and irrevocable matrimonial consent) was constitutionally untenable, at least in respect of minors. Yet the Court did not strike down the exception in its entirety, leaving married adult women without protection.

When Parliament replaced the IPC with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita in 2023, the legislative opportunity to remedy this injustice was squandered. Section 63 of the BNS, which now governs the offence of rape, retains Exception 2 in substance, raising the wife’s minimum age from fifteen to eighteen but doing no more than codifying the Supreme Court’s 2017 direction. The architecture of impunity was preserved; only its outer boundary was adjusted. The omission is made more glaring by two internal inconsistencies within the BNS itself.

First, Section 67[5] of the BNS, mirroring Section 376B of the IPC, criminalises non-consensual sexual intercourse by a husband who is separated from his wife. The legislature thus already recognises, in the context of separation, that a husband can be guilty of raping his wife. The exception for the cohabiting husband is therefore not a principled position; it is a legal fiction that dissolves the moment the couple physically separates. If non-consent within marriage can be criminal in one factual context, there is no coherent basis for it being non-criminal in another.

Second, the BNS has entirely omitted Section 377 of the IPC,[6] which previously criminalised carnal intercourse against the order of nature. Because Section 377 did not carry the marital exception that Section 375 did, it allowed wives to prosecute husbands for forced non-natural acts (such as oral or anal intercourse) falling outside conventional penile-vaginal intercourse. Its deletion has closed that narrow window, leaving married women with fewer legal remedies against sexual violence than they possessed under the colonial-era code the BNS was meant to replace.

The statutory landscape, therefore, presents a deeply troubling picture. A law that claims to be progressive and decolonised has not only retained a colonial exception but has simultaneously eliminated one ancillary provision that offered any residual protection. The legal architecture does not merely fail married women; it actively exposes them.

III. Landmark Case Laws and Judicial Precedents

The judicial journey of the marital rape exception in India is one of incremental acknowledgment and persistent institutional hesitation. Courts have, over decades, built a rich constitutional jurisprudence around bodily autonomy, dignity, and sexual agency, yet have stopped just short of applying that jurisprudence to its logical conclusion within the institution of marriage. The cases that follow form both the evidentiary foundation and the constitutional scaffolding for the argument that the marital rape exception cannot survive scrutiny.

Foundational Supreme Court Precedents

K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1[7] stands as the most important constitutional precedent for the criminalisation of marital rape. In this nine-judge bench decision, the Supreme Court unanimously recognised the right to privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution. It also held that the right to privacy includes decisional privacy: the ability to make intimate decisions of a sexual or procreative nature. This formulation admits of no exception based on marital status. A married woman’s decision to refuse sexual intercourse is as much an exercise of decisional privacy as any other intimate choice, and the State’s failure to protect that decision through criminal law is a direct violation of the fundamental right so recognised.

State of Karnataka v. Krishnappa, (2000) 4 SCC 75[8] laid an equally important foundation. The Supreme Court held that sexual violence, apart from being a dehumanising act, is an unlawful intrusion upon the right to privacy and the sanctity of a woman, and that non-consensual sexual intercourse amounts to a violation of Article 21. The Court drew no distinction between married and unmarried women while articulating this principle. The proposition that rape violates Article 21 was stated in universal terms.

Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, (2018) 10 SCC 1[9] and Joseph Shine v. Union of India, (2019) 3 SCC 39[10] marked the Supreme Court’s clearest articulation of personal autonomy and sexual agency as constitutional values. In Navtej Singh Johar, which decriminalised consensual same-sex relations, the Court held that an individual’s sexual identity and choices are at the core of constitutional liberty. In Joseph Shine, striking down the offence of adultery, the Court explicitly rejected the notion that a woman’s sexual autonomy is subordinated to her husband’s upon marriage, holding that a wife is not her husband’s property. The existence of the marital rape exception creates a paradox: the same Court that declared a wife is not her husband’s property has, through the survival of Exception 2, permitted the law to treat her body as precisely that.

Shayara Bano v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1[11], while primarily concerning the practice of triple talaq, produced a constitutional principle of wide application: laws that operate on patriarchal assumptions about women’s roles within marriage are inherently discriminatory and violate constitutional guarantees of equality and dignity. The marital rape exception is a legal fossil that insists marriage is a consent-shifting event. It rests on the fallacy that a wedding ceremony constitutes a permanent, irrevocable waiver of a woman’s bodily integrity, a premise that is fundamentally incompatible with a modern democracy built on the foundation of individual dignity.

Hrishikesh Sahoo v. State of Karnataka (Karnataka High Court, 2022)[12] was the first direct judicial confrontation with the marital rape exception in the context of an actual prosecution. The petitioner, a husband charged with rape, cruelty, and other offences by his wife, approached the Karnataka High Court seeking discharge on the ground that the marital rape exception shielded him from prosecution. The High Court rejected the contention. It declared that “a man is a man, an act is an act, and rape is a rape, be it performed by a man (the husband) upon the woman (the wife).” The Court further held that the institution of marriage does not confer any special privilege upon men and that an obligation to be punished for an act does not dissolve merely because the perpetrator is a husband. The petitioner challenged the matter before the Supreme Court, where it remains pending.

RIT Foundation v. Union of India, 2022 SCC OnLine Del 1404[13] (Delhi High Court, 11 May 2022) is the most significant judicial pronouncement on the marital rape exception. A Division Bench of Justice Rajiv Shakdher and Justice C. Hari Shankar delivered a split verdict, a division that itself reflects the profound constitutional tension at the heart of this issue.

Justice Rajiv Shakdher, in a judgment widely described as a masterpiece of constitutional adjudication, struck down Exception 2 to Section 375 of the IPC as unconstitutional. He held that the exception violates Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21 of the Constitution, reasoning that married women do not surrender their fundamental right to refuse sexual intercourse upon entering matrimony. His most powerful formulation, “when marriage becomes tyranny, the State cannot have a legitimate interest in saving it,” dismantled the central justification offered by defenders of the exception. He further held that striking down the exception would not amount to the creation of a new offence but merely the removal of an unconstitutional legal fiction, directly addressing the separation-of-powers concern raised by opponents of criminalisation.

Justice C. Hari Shankar, in his dissent, upheld the exception on the ground that marriage creates a unique set of obligations and expectations between spouses, and that the legislature’s decision to treat spousal sexual violence differently from stranger rape is a legitimate policy choice entitled to judicial deference. He held that the exception did not violate Articles 14 or 21, and that the appropriate remedy for a wife subjected to non-consensual intercourse lay in civil and other criminal remedies rather than prosecution for rape. This judgment has been subjected to considerable scholarly criticism; its elevation of institutional preservation over individual constitutional rights represents precisely the kind of judicial timidity that the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence on personal autonomy has consistently warned against.

The Pending Supreme Court Proceedings

In October 2023, a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud began hearing a consolidated batch of petitions[14] challenging the marital rape exception. Petitioners, represented by Senior Advocates Karuna Nundy and Colin Gonsalves, argued that Exception 2 to Section 63 of the BNS violates Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21. A pivotal point in their submission was the internal inconsistency of the BNS: Section 67 already criminalises rape by a separated husband. This proves that the law acknowledges the breach of marital consent, rendering the broader immunity of cohabiting husbands not a principled stance, but a manifestly arbitrary one.

The Union of India filed a 49-page affidavit[15] opposing the striking down of the exception, the first time the government had formally taken this position before the Supreme Court. While the government conceded that marriage does not obliterate a woman’s consent, it argued that labelling such acts as “rape” would be excessively harsh and disproportionate. This position, however, is constitutionally untenable. The harshness of the terminology merely reflects the gravity of the violation; shielding an act from its proper legal characterisation serves only to protect the perpetrator by sacrificing the victim’s dignity. The Supreme Court’s eventual verdict will be the definitive constitutional pronouncement on bodily autonomy in independent India.

IV. Constitutional Infirmities of the Marital Rape Exception

A. Violation of Article 14: The Right to Equality
Article 14 of the Constitution guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the laws to all persons. The Supreme Court has consistently held, beginning with State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar, AIR 1952 SC 75,[16] and Budhan Choudhary v. State of Bihar, AIR 1955 SC 191,[17] that any legislative classification must satisfy a two-pronged test: it must be founded on an intelligible differentia, and that differentia must bear a rational nexus to the object the legislation seeks to achieve.

The object of Section 63 of the BNS (as of Section 375 of the IPC before it) is to protect women from non-consensual sexual acts and to punish those who commit such acts. Exception 2 creates a classification between married and unmarried women for the purposes of this protection. The question, therefore, is whether marital status bears any rational nexus to the objective of protecting women from rape. It manifestly does not. The physical violation, psychological trauma, and violation of dignity that rape inflicts upon a woman are identical regardless of whether she is married to her attacker or not. Indeed, as multiple studies and the testimony of survivors consistently demonstrate, marital rape may cause greater and more lasting psychological harm precisely because it is perpetrated by a person the victim trusted, within the space she considered home. A classification that withdraws the protection of the rape law from a woman based solely on her relationship with her attacker, when the harm inflicted is identical, fails the rational nexus test entirely. Exception 2 does not merely fail to advance the objective of Section 63; it directly contradicts it.

B. Violation of Article 15: Non-Discrimination Based on Sex
Article 15 prohibits the State from discriminating against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. Marital status, while not explicitly listed, is a status that derives entirely from sex in this context: it is only a woman’s consent that is extinguished by marriage, never a man’s. The exception is therefore, in both origin and effect, a discrimination on the ground of sex, falling squarely within the prohibition of Article 15.

Moreover, Article 15(3) permits the State to make special provision for women; it does not permit the State to make provisions that actively disadvantage them. Exception 2 does not protect women; it exposes them. It is not a special provision in favour of women but a special immunity in favour of men who commit sexual violence against their wives.

C. Violation of Article 21: The Right to Life and Personal Liberty
Article 21 guarantees to every person the right to life and personal liberty. The Supreme Court’s expansive interpretation of this provision has, over decades, extended it to encompass the right to health, the right to dignity, the right to privacy, and (as articulated in Puttaswamy) the right to decisional autonomy in matters of an intimate and sexual nature.

The marital rape exception strikes at each of these dimensions of Article 21 simultaneously. It denies a married woman the right to bodily autonomy (the most elementary component of personal liberty) by declaring that her husband’s forcible penetration of her body is not a criminal act. It denies her the right to dignity by reducing her to an instrument of her husband’s sexual gratification, devoid of agency or legal personhood in the most personal sphere. It denies her the right to decisional privacy by rendering her refusal legally irrelevant. And it denies her the right to live free from violence by declining to classify the violence she suffers as a crime.[18]

D. The Justice Verma Committee: An Unheeded Call for Reform
In the wake of the 2012 Delhi gang rape, the Justice J.S. Verma Committee provided a landmark blueprint for gender justice. Its 2013 report was unequivocal: marital rape admits of no exception in a legal system that takes bodily autonomy seriously.[19] The Committee recommended the outright deletion of Exception 2 to Section 375 of the IPC, arguing that the marital relationship should never serve as a valid defence for sexual violation. While the resulting Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2013 adopted various procedural reforms, Parliament conspicuously ignored this recommendation. This legislative failure was later entrenched by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which merely adjusted the wife’s age to eighteen while preserving the core immunity.

V. Inadequacy of Existing Remedies

A. Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005
The Domestic Violence Act is a civil statute. Its primary remedies are protection orders, residence orders, monetary relief, and custody orders; these are preventive and compensatory in nature, not punitive. They do not result in a conviction, and they do not carry the stigma of criminality that reflects the gravity of the act committed. A husband who repeatedly forces himself upon his wife may be directed to vacate the matrimonial home or pay maintenance, but he cannot, under the DV Act alone, be imprisoned for the act of rape itself. The law treats the symptom of domestic discord while declining to name, much less punish, the crime that underlies it.

Moreover, the DV Act’s definition of “sexual abuse” under Section 3(b)[20] includes any conduct of a sexual nature that abuses, humiliates, degrades, or otherwise violates the dignity of the woman. While this provision is broad enough to encompass marital rape conceptually, it leads only to civil remedies. The constitutional right to dignity that is violated by rape is not vindicated by a protection order. It demands criminal accountability; the full force of the State’s penal machinery must be brought to bear upon the perpetrator in recognition of the gravity of his act.

The deeper contradiction is worth noting. The Domestic Violence Act itself represents a State acknowledgement that the private sphere of marriage is not beyond legal intervention, that a husband’s conduct within the matrimonial home is subject to the scrutiny of law and sanction. Yet the government provides no penal provision to safeguard victims of the gravest form of that abuse.

B. Sections 85 and 86 of the BNS: Cruelty
Section 85 of the BNS, corresponding to Section 498A of the IPC, criminalises cruelty by a husband or his relatives towards his wife. Cruelty is defined to include both mental and physical harm. While repeated non-consensual intercourse may, in some circumstances, constitute cruelty within the meaning of this provision, it is not a substitute for a rape prosecution. The offence of cruelty carries a maximum sentence of three years, a fraction of the minimum sentence of ten years prescribed for rape under Section 64 of the BNS. The disparity in punishment reflects the fact that rape is a categorically graver offence than generalised cruelty. To route a marital rape prosecution through the cruelty provision is to systematically undervalue the violation suffered by the victim.

VI. International Precedents and India’s Treaty Obligations

A. The United Kingdom: The Birthplace of the Exception
The most powerful irony in the history of the marital rape exception is that the jurisdiction from which India inherited the exception was also the first common law jurisdiction to rescind it judicially. In R v. R, [1991] 4 All ER 481,[21] the House of Lords unanimously held that the marital rape exemption (the very dictum of Sir Matthew Hale that underpins Exception 2 of the Indian statute) had no place in modern law. Lord Keith of Kinkel, delivering the leading judgment, observed that marriage in the late twentieth century was a partnership of equals and that the fiction of implied, irrevocable matrimonial consent ought no longer to be applied. The exemption was subsequently codified into abolition by the Sexual Offences Act, 2003,[22] which makes no distinction between marital rape and non-marital rape for the purposes of criminal liability. India received this legal tradition and refused to evolve alongside it. The BNS, presented as a decolonisation of the criminal law, retained the exception even after the colonisers themselves discarded it.

B. The United States
In the United States, marital rape was criminalised across all fifty states by 1993. The movement towards criminalisation was driven by the recognition, embedded in the law of each state, that consent is a continuous requirement in sexual relations and that the existence of a marriage licence creates no exception to the criminal law of rape. Several states retain procedural distinctions, such as shorter reporting windows for spousal rape, but substantive criminal liability is universal and unqualified.

C. CEDAW and India’s Treaty Obligations
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was ratified by India in 1993. In 2017, the CEDAW Committee released General Recommendation No. 35,[23] which requires all State parties to ensure that all types of gender-based violence against women are criminalised, prosecuted, and punished, including sexual violence within marriage.[24] The Recommendation further stipulates that legal provisions which exempt certain offenders (including spouses) from criminal liability for sexual violence are discriminatory under the Convention and must be repealed. India’s retention of the marital rape exception is therefore in plain breach of its obligations under CEDAW.

Although CEDAW is not directly enforceable as domestic law, the Supreme Court held in Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, (1997) 6 SCC 241,[25] that international conventions to which India is a party may be read into the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution where domestic law is silent or inadequate. The CEDAW obligation to criminalise marital rape should therefore inform the constitutional interpretation of Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21 in the pending Supreme Court proceedings.

D. The UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women
Article 2 of the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, adopted by the General Assembly in 1993, includes marital rape among the types of violence against women that member states are mandated to condemn and address. The failure of India to criminalise marital rape represents a continuing breach of this international standard, which India itself voted to adopt. The global experience conclusively shows that all the evils associated with criminalising marital rape (destruction of the institution of marriage, an epidemic of false complaints, invasion of the private realm) have not materialised in any of the more than one hundred and fifty countries that have enacted such laws. Marriage has not collapsed in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. What has changed is the relationship between husband and wife: from one of dominance and submission, to one of mutual respect between equal legal persons. That is not a result to be feared; it is a constitutional aspiration to be realised.

VII. Countering the Common Objections

Opposition to criminalising marital rape rests on an institutional, practical, and patriarchal trilogy of arguments. Yet each of these objections fails when subjected to the scrutiny of constitutional morality and global empirical evidence.

1. The Fallacy of Institutional Destruction: The frequently stated objection that criminalisation will “destroy the institution of marriage” lacks legal coherence. The suggestion is that marriage is sustainable only when a husband’s right to commit sexual assault is preserved. If a partnership requires the sacrifice of a woman’s fundamental rights, it is no longer a partnership at all; it is a system of organised exploitation. Such an entity is not worthy of constitutional protection. Moreover, studies from the United Kingdom and the United States show no collapse in marriage rates following criminalisation; rather, they reflect a changed normative understanding of marriage as a relationship grounded in consent.

2. The Narrative of Misuse: The claim that women will weaponise the law to file false complaints is a familiar one, cast upon almost every protective statute including Section 498A (Cruelty). The Supreme Court in Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar ruled that the possibility of misuse cannot justify the wholesale denial of a right; safeguards such as preliminary inquiries can be built into the procedure. To think otherwise is to presume, as a matter of law, that married women are inherently less credible than unmarried ones. This is a bias of patriarchy that the law must reject.

3. The Paradox of Bedroom Privacy: Some invoke Puttaswamy to argue that the State must not enter the private sphere of the bedroom. This reasoning turns the judgment on its head. The right to privacy was conceived for the protection of the victim’s bodily autonomy, not as a shield for the perpetrator’s violence. The State has already entered the “private” space of marriage through the DV Act, dowry laws, and POCSO. The bedroom cannot be claimed as a zone of legal immunity for criminal acts.

4. The Challenge of Proof: Non-marital rape also faces significant evidentiary challenges. Difficulty in securing convictions has never been accepted as a ground for decriminalisation (consider corruption laws as an analogy). Criminal law has a declaratory function: it must state that marital rape is a wrong, even if prosecution in every case is difficult. The law must affirm that a married woman’s right to consent does not expire at the altar.

5. The Claim of Adequacy of Existing Laws: As discussed above, current frameworks such as the DV Act are civil in nature, and the cruelty provision under Section 85 of the BNS carries a punishment wholly disproportionate to the gravity of rape. A system that recognises a crime but refuses to name it “rape” is not doing justice; it manages the consequences of a crime while shielding the offender from its proper legal characterisation.

VIII. Conclusion: The Constitutional Imperative

The marital rape exception persists not because of constitutionally valid legislation, but because of legislative inertia and the continued preference for patriarchal institutions over individual dignity.

The colonial-era exception is wholly incompatible with the transformative spirit of the Indian Constitution. As this article demonstrates, by retaining Exception 2 in Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the legislature has not “decolonised” the law; it has merely repackaged a seventeenth-century fiction that treats a wife’s body as a marital entitlement.

The exception fails every test of constitutional validity under Articles 14, 15, and 21. The Supreme Court has already built the constitutional scaffolding in its own jurisprudence, from Puttaswamy to Joseph Shine. While the government continues to invoke the sanctity of marriage and the fear of misuse, international experience and the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee make clear that criminalisation strengthens marriage rather than destroys it.

Consent does not expire at the altar. The domestic sphere must not be permitted to operate as a law-free zone in a constitutional republic. The Supreme Court has the opportunity to declare that the guarantees of dignity and bodily autonomy do not vanish at the door of the matrimonial home. Exception 2 should be struck down: not as an act of judicial overreach, but as the long-overdue fulfilment of the Constitution’s promise.

References

[1] Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Coronae (vol 1, 1736) 629.
[2] Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill 2025 (Shashi Tharoor, Lok Sabha, 5 December 2025).
[3] Indian Penal Code 1860, s 375, Exception 2.
[4] Independent Thought v. Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 800.
[5] Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, s 67.
[6] Indian Penal Code 1860, s 377.
[7] K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1.
[8] State of Karnataka v. Krishnappa (2000) 4 SCC 75.
[9] Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018) 10 SCC 1.
[10] Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2019) 3 SCC 39.
[11] Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017) 9 SCC 1.
[12] Hrishikesh Sahoo v. State of Karnataka Criminal Petition No 2135 of 2021 (Karnataka HC, 2022).
[13] RIT Foundation v. Union of India 2022 SCC OnLine Del 1404.
[14] Hrishikesh Sahoo v. State of Karnataka SLP (Crl) 2022 (SC) (Pending).
[15] Union of India, Affidavit in Batch of Petitions Challenging Marital Rape Exception (Supreme Court of India, 4 October 2024).
[16] State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar AIR 1952 SC 75.
[17] Budhan Choudhary v. State of Bihar AIR 1955 SC 191.
[18] SPRF, ‘Marital Rape Exception: A Policy Brief’ (2022).
[19] Justice J.S. Verma and others, Report of the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law (2013).
[20] Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005, s 3(b).
[21] R v. R [1991] 4 All ER 481 (HL).
[22] Sexual Offences Act 2003 (UK), s 1.
[23] Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (adopted 18 December 1979, ratified by India 9 July 1993).
[24] CEDAW Committee, General Recommendation No. 35 on gender-based violence against women (2017) UN Doc CEDAW/C/GC/35.
[25] Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan (1997) 6 SCC 241.