NEW DELHI – India’s top court Thursday ruled that adultery is no longer acrime, declaring a colonial-era law that punished the offence with jailtime unconstitutional and discriminatory against women.
The more than century-old law prescribed that any man who slept with amarried woman without her husband’s permission had committed adultery, acrime carrying a five-year prison term.
“Thinking of adultery from a point of view of criminality is a retrogradestep,” unanimously declared the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court.
Women could not file a complaint under the archaic law nor be held liablefor adultery themselves, making it solely the realm of men.
The court said the law deprived women of dignity and individual choice, andtreated them as the property of men.
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It also said that adultery, while valid grounds for divorce, was a privatematter.
The court upheld the legality of the crime in 1954, arguing that inadultery “it is commonly accepted that it is the man who is the seducer,and not the women”.
A petitioner had challenged the law earlier this year, describing it asdiscriminatory. – APP/AFP
