A win for justice
Live MintThe Karnataka high court this week declined to quash rape charges levelled by a wife against her husband, denying him an infamous exception in our rape law. “A man is a man; an act is an act; rape is a rape, be it performed by a man the ‘husband’ on the woman ‘wife’,” a single-judge bench of Justice M. Nagaprasanna said. Noting its negative psychological and physiological effects, the ruling called upon lawmakers to criminalize marital rape, reasoning that a legal cover for it was contrary to the “soul of the Constitution”, the Right to Equality. Almost a fourth of all Indian women reported facing either domestic or sexual violence, according to our latest National Family Health Survey, while this survey’s previous round had found women in India 17 times more likely on average to face sexual violence from their husbands than others.