SC on Thursday began scrutinising petitions seeking to criminalise a husband’s sexual acts with his non-consenting wife by challenging the validity of the exception of marital rape from the offence of rape in Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita and its predecessor, IPC, on the ground that women have an inviolable right to say no to sex in marriage.
A bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra had a lingering doubt amidst fierce assertion by senior advocate Karuna Nundy, on behalf of AIDWA on women’s right to freedom of expression, including her sexuality in marriage, and asked, “Can the court create a new offence by striking down the exception to Section 63 of BNS?” SC had in 2017 redrafted the exception to definition of the offence of rape in Section 375 of IPC, which had carved out an exception: “sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under 15 years of age, is not rape.”