BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court said that Section 69 of BNS criminalises sexual intercourse by employing deceitful means, including a promise of marriage, without the intention of fulfilment. The provision, though newly introduced, cannot be interpreted in a manner that allows it to become an instrument of retroactive criminalisation of consensual relationships upon the mere recital of “promise”, the court added.
“The statute punishes deceit, not disappointment; fraud, not failed affection; and exploitation, not the collapse of the relationship”, said Justice M Nagaprasanna, passing the order on January 19 while quashing the criminal proceedings initiated against a lawyer and his family members by a mother of two children, alleging that the lawyer had a physical relationship on the promise of marriage, but he did not, and his family members supported him instead of allowing him marry her.
Recalling the complaint lodged with the Byadarahalli police station in 2024, the court said it is difficult to discern where the offence under Section 69 could even spring. The complainant, on her own showing and on admitted records, appears to have been married or associated in other relationships and to have children. In such circumstances, the allegation of sexual intercourse, induced solely on the promise of marriage, is inherently implausible and legally unsustainable; consequently, neither Section 69 BNS nor Section 64 BNS (Section 376 of the IPC) can be attracted, the court said.
The court further stated that the offence under Section 89 of the BNS is also not made out. What then remains is Section 318(2) of the BNS (Section 420 of the IPC), even that cannot be invoked merely because a relationship did not culminate in marriage.
The settled position of law is that, breach of a promise to marry, howsoever morally questionable, is not per se cheating in the criminal sense, unless dishonest intention at the inception is established, which is conspicuously absent in the case at hand.
Referring to the birth certificates of the children of the complainant born out of an earlier marriage, the court said how the complainant could credibly assert that she consented to sexual relationship on a “promise of marriage” when she appears to have been in a subsisting marital relationship or at the very least, in a continuing domestic association, and is also mother of two children, one about 13 years old and the other about 4 years.
The court further said that the complaint is not a genuine criminal grievance, but bears a strong imprint of manipulation and of an attempt to convert private discord into public prosecution. This court cannot permit the criminal process to be employed as an engine of harassment or a weapon of retaliation and become an abuse of the process of the law, eventually resulting in miscarriage of justice, the court added.