The Karnataka High Court dismissed two criminal proceedings brought by a woman against a Bengaluru resident alleging rape in the promise of marriage following a six-year relationship. The court called it a textbook example of exploitation of the legal system.
The court said, “It is not one, two, three, four or five, but six years of a consensual physical or sexual relationship between the petitioner and the complainant after having met through a social media platform. The complaint narrates all details. The allegation that is made later is, from 27 December 2019, the intimacy between the two waned. Fading away of intimacy after 6 years of consensual acts of sexual intercourse cannot mean that it would constitute ingredients of rape.”
In general, if a man indulges in consensual sexual relations with a woman promising marriage and later refuses to fulfil the promise, the woman can level a rape charge against the man. But in this case, the court refuse to accept the charge because the relationship lasted 6 long years.
Justice M Nagaprasanna noted, “They were consensual acts from Day 1 and remained so till December 27, 2019.” He cancelled the proceedings relating to the First Information Reports lodged against the petitioner in the Indiranagar police in Bengaluru city and Davanagere police station in 2021.
The judge noted that it cannot but be inferred that the sexual relationship would not constitute rape for it to be criminal under section 376 of the Indian Penal Code considering the length of time it lasted which was six long years, to be exact.
The court cited the Supreme Court decision in the Pramod Suryabhan Pawar v. State of Maharashtra case and a few other similar examples. “If further proceedings are permitted to continue, it would run foul of (a) plethora of judgments rendered by the Supreme Court on the issue.”
The accused had befriended the complainant through Facebook in 2013. She claimed that because he lived nearby, she was frequently lured to his home under the pretence that he was an excellent chef. When she used to visit him, he would make delectable meals, and they would also drink beer as well as engage in sexual liaisons. However, he breached his commitment to marry her after maintaining sexual contact with her for roughly six years.
She filed a case with the Indiranagar police on 8 March 2021 and accused him of fraud and criminal intimidation among other things. Later, after discovering that he had moved to Davanagere after receiving bail, she went there and launched another case for assault and rape based on a similar set of charges. A second female was listed in addition to him in the second case. The police had submitted chargesheets in both cases.
On the other hand, the man alleged that the woman has the habit of befriending affluent men and later filing cases against them to extort money. He alleged that in another instance, she was involved in an intimate relationship with a man before making a similar complaint against him with the Bengaluru Airport police station in which she also accused him of breach of promise of marriage and rape, among other things.
The male was exonerated in 2016, the court was informed, when the woman became hostile and changed the facts of her account.
