The more than century-old adultery law prescribed that any man who slept with a married woman without her husband’s permission had committed adultery, a crime carrying a five-year prison term in the conservative country. “Thinking of adultery from a point of view of criminality is a retrograde step,” unanimously declared the five-judge bench of the Supreme Court. “It disregards the sexual autonomy which every woman possesses and denies agency to a woman in a matrimonial tie,” said Supreme Court Justice D. Y. Chandrachud. “For a man to be convicted for adultery is very rare because the crime has to be proved conclusively beyond doubt in the court. Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer in the Supreme Court, said the watershed decisions on gay sex and adultery had shown the judges’ “adherence to liberal values and the constitution”.

Source: Punch September 27, 2018 12:47 UTC