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Joseph Shine v. Union of India

Writ Petition (Criminal) · 2018 INSC 898Decided 27 Sept 2018
Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 194 of 2017
Chief Justice Dipak Misra · Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman · Justice A.M. Khanwilkar · Dr. Justice D.Y. Chandrachud · Justice Indu Malhotra

Background

A non-resident Indian, Joseph Shine, filed a public interest writ petition challenging the constitutional validity of Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code (the offence of "adultery") and Section 198(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure (the procedure for prosecuting it). Under the old law, only a man could be prosecuted for having sexual relations with another man's wife without her husband's consent, the wife could not be prosecuted even as an abettor, and the husband alone (treated effectively as the "owner" of his wife's sexuality) could bring the complaint. The petition argued this scheme was deeply discriminatory against both women and men and violated the Constitution's guarantees of equality and dignity.

Decision Breakdown

All five judges agreed that Section 497 IPC was unconstitutional and struck it down, along with Section 198(2) CrPC to the extent it enabled adultery prosecutions, overruling the Court's own earlier decisions (Sowmithri Vishnu, V. Revathi, and others) that had upheld the law. The judges reasoned that the provision treated a married woman as her husband's property rather than an autonomous individual, was based on outdated gender stereotypes, violated Articles 14 (equality), 15 (non-discrimination) and 21 (dignity, privacy and personal liberty), and was "manifestly arbitrary" because it criminalized the man's conduct but not the woman's, and gave the husband alone standing to prosecute. The Court held adultery could remain a ground for divorce (a civil wrong) but should not be treated as a crime, since criminalizing private consensual conduct between adults was an unwarranted intrusion into personal autonomy and the marital domain.

Lesson Learnt

A law that singles out one spouse (or one gender) for criminal punishment over private, consensual conduct, while denying the other spouse any real agency, cannot survive the Constitution's guarantees of equality and dignity: adultery may still affect a marriage and matter for divorce, but the State does not get to send anyone to jail over it.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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