NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to examine the constitutional validity of a 157-year-old ‘gender discriminatory’ provision in Indian Penal Code which punishes a married man for adultery with another man’s wife, reports The Times of India.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud sought the Centre’s response in four weeks to a PIL by Joseph Shine from Kerala who is employed at Trento in Italy on why a married man alone and not the consenting wife of another should be hauled up.
What persuaded the SC to examine the constitutional validity of what it felt might be an archaic provision was the clean chit given to the woman, irrespective of her role in the adulterous relationship, as also counsel Kaleeswaram Raj’s argument that as per Section 497 no offence of adultery is committed if there was a consensual relationship between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman; an unmarried man and a married woman; and between a married man and an unmarried woman.
“Ordinarily, criminal law proceeds on gender neutrality but in this provision, as we perceive, the said concept is absent. That apart, it is to be seen when there is conferment of any affirmative right on women, can it go to the extent of treating them as the victim, in all circumstances” while leaving the adulterous married man to face the grind of the law, the CJI-led bench said.
The apex court’s constitutional approach also stumbled upon another aberration in Section 497, which provided that it is not adultery if a married man had an adulterous relationship with a married woman with her husband’s consent or connivance.
The bench said: “it is perceivable from the language employed in the Section that the fulcrum of the offence is destroyed once the consent or the connivance of the husband is established. Viewed from the said scenario, the provision really creates a dent on the individual independent identity of a woman when the emphasis is laid on the connivance or the consent of the husband. This tantamount to the subordination of a woman where the Constitution confers equal status.”