New Delhi: The Supreme Court Monday granted protection from arrest for eight weeks to a man, accused of raping a woman on the false pretext of marriage, and asked whether a physical relationship between a couple who is living together as husband and wife could be called rape.
If a couple is living together as husband and wife, the husband may be a brutal man but can you call the act of sexual intercourse between them rape?, observed a bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde.
"Are you willing to marry her," was the question posed to a public servant, who is accused of repeatedly raping a minor girl but when the Supreme Court on Monday was told that he is already married he was asked to seek regular bail from the concerned court.
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"If you are willing to marry her then we can consider it, otherwise, you will go to jail, observed the bench adding We are not forcing you to marry," the court earlier maintained.
The bench, also comprising Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian, observed this while hearing the pleas, including the one filed by the accused who has moved the apex court against the Allahabad High Court's April 2019 order which had refused to quash the FIR lodged against him at Gautam Budh Nagar district in Uttar Pradesh.
During the hearing conducted through video-conferencing, the counsel appearing for the complainant woman said that the accused had taken her consent by fraud and it was not free to consent.
The lawyer claimed that in 2014, the accused took her to a temple in Manali in Himachal Pradesh where they performed marriage rituals.
Making a false promise of marriage is wrong. Even a woman should not make such a promise and then break off, the bench said.
Senior advocate Vibha Datta Makhija, appearing for the petitioner, said that the accused and the woman were in a live-in relation for two years and later she lodged an FIR alleging rape on the false promise of marriage.