New Delhi: The Karnataka high court (HC) has refused to quash a rape charge against a man filed by his wife.
“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’,” said Justice M. Nagaprasanna on Wednesday.
The “age-old…regressive” thought that “husbands are the rulers of their wives, their body, mind and soul should be effaced,” the court said.
The single-judge bench of the Karnataka High Court was a case filed by a woman against her husband for treating her as a ‘sex slave’ ever since they were married.
The husband has been accused of forcing his wife into unnatural sex in the presence of their daughter as well.
He had moved the High Court after a trial court took cognisance of the offence under Section 376 (rape).
Referring to exceptions in IPC Section 375 that says “Sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under 15 years of age, is not rape,” Justice Nagaprasanna said, exempting a husband for his acts, destroys the Right to Equality which is the soul of the Constitution.
The court put the onus of amending this provision of IPC Section 376, on the legislature.
Even though the Justice J.S. Verma Committee, appointed by the Union government, had recommended deleting the exception of marital rape, the subsequent amendment only replaced the word ‘rape’ with ‘sexual assault’ in IPC section 375, the Judge added.