Unmarried girls do not indulge in carnal activities for fun – MP High Court

The Madhya Pradesh High Court has observed that unmarried girls in India are still conservative and they don’t indulge in carnal activities for “fun” without “assurance of marriage”.

Hearing a bail plea, Justice Subodh Abhyankar on Friday (August 13) dismissed the accused’s application, which claimed that he did not force the complainant into having sex with him and that it was a consensual relationship.

Justice Abhyankar said that in most cases of rape, involving adults, the defence tries to escape the charge by saying that the complainant was a “consenting party”. But the court observed that, except for a few cases, this logic doesn’t stand. The judge, in this case, told the accused that he cannot “plead consent on the part of the prosecutrix and laugh all the way to your home”.

Case background

The rape accused and the complainant were together since 2018. The prosecution stated that the accused had repeatedly raped the complainant for last three years on the promise that he will marry her someday. The woman’s case gained strength because she made the charge (of rape) in her dying declaration when she attempted suicide. The woman took the extreme step after the accused, on June 1 2021, told her that he won’t marry her and that his marriage had been fixed elsewhere. The accused was arrested a few days later.

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The defence counsel argued that the complainant was an adult during the time she was in a relationship with the accused and that she had agreed to have a physical relationship with the accused. The defence also said that the woman approached the police under pressure from her family.

The accused is a Hindu while the complainant is Muslim. Their families were against the marriage from the beginning, reads the police complaint.

‘Boy should have known his actions would have consequences’

The Madhya Pradesh High Court refused to grant bail to the accused on the grounds that the accused had “apparently allured the prosecutrix to enter into a physical relationship on the pretext of marriage despite knowing fully well that both of them are from different religions”.

“This Court is also of the considered opinion that a boy who is entering into a physical relationship with a lass must realize that his actions have consequences and should be ready to face the same as it is the girl who is always at the receiving end because it is she who runs the risk of being pregnant and also her ignominy in the society, if her relationship is disclosed,” the High Court observed.

Justice Abhyankar said: “India are a conservative society, it has not yet reached such level (advance or lower) of civilization where unmarried girls, regardless of their religion, indulge in carnal activities with boys just for the fun of it, unless the same is backed by some future promise/assurance of marriage and to prove her point, it is not necessary every time for a victim to try to commit suicide as in the present case.”