The Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court has acquitted a 31-year-old man of the rape case registered against him, saying consensual sex does not amount to rape. It does not constitute the crime of rape when the woman is in a relationship willingly, allegedly under the pretext of marriage.
A single bench of Justice M W Chandwani, in a recently passed order, said that the defendant man had only broken the promise of marriage and the woman was not lured into marriage in order to establish physical relations with him. “There is a difference between breaking a promise and not fulfilling a false promise,” the court said.
The 33-year-old woman had claimed in an FIR lodged with the Nagpur Police in 2019 that she was in a relationship with the man since 2016. Both people wanted to get married. During this time both of them also had physical relations.
When the woman came to know that the man was engaged to another woman, she lodged a complaint with the police.
The accused petitioner against this FIR told the court that he intended to marry the complainant woman, but the woman rejected his proposal and told him that she would marry someone else. The family members of the accused petitioner also disapproved of this relationship. After which he got engaged to another woman.
The complainant woman lodged an FIR out of anger and not only this, she also got engaged to another man in 2021.
The court noted that the victim was a mature adult and said that the allegations made by her did not indicate that the man’s promise to marry her was false. At most, it is a case of non-fulfillment or breach of promise due to circumstances which the applicant (accused) did not foresee or which were beyond his control because he was unable to marry the victim, despite his desire to get marry with her .
The court further said that there is no material on record to show that since the beginning of the relationship, the man had no intention of marrying the victim and had only made a false promise to establish physical relations. The court said that there is weight in the arguments of the RP petitioner and there are sufficient grounds to prove that he had entered into physical relations with the complainant woman by luring her. Therefore, he cannot be accused of rape.
