The Supreme Court will on Wednesday pronounce its verdict on whether or not an exception to rape, sanctioned by the Indian Penal Code, that allows a man to have sexual intercourse with his wife aged above 15 is valid.
A Bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and Deepak Gupta will pronounce the verdict on the disparity between this exception to Section 375 (rape) of the IPC, which allows a husband to have sexual relationship with his 15-year-old wife, and the definition of ‘child’ in recent laws such as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, which includes any person below the age of 18.
The court has repeatedly questioned the continued existence of this exception to rape when the other parliamentary laws have uniformly said that the age of consent of a girl is 18.
It, however, had said that it did not want to go into the aspect of marital rape.
The government had given a measured response during the hearing of the petition filed by an NGO, Independent Thought, submitting that doing away with this exception clause in the IPC would open a Pandora’s box on marital rape, which does not exist in India.
It had referred to the concept of age of puberty among Muslims for the purpose of marriage, and said these aspects had been deliberated upon by Parliament before arriving at a conclusion.
Social evil
However, the court had expressed its distress at how laws had not been able to stop the social evil of child marriage, especially in rural parts of the country.
The NGO has contended that the exception clause was “violative of Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution to the extent that it permits intrusive sexual intercourse with a girl child aged between 15 and 18 years, only on the ground that she has been married.”
