New Delhi: A man accused of rape can be convicted only if he has a malafide intention of not fulfilling a promise of marrying the victim, the Supreme Court yesterday said, describing the crime as an assault on the “body and privacy of the victims”.
“An accused can be convicted for rape only if the court reaches a conclusion that the intention of the accused was malafide, and that he had clandestine motives,” said an apex court bench of Justice B S Chauhan and Justice Dipak Misra.
The court said this while setting aside a January 28, 2010, order of the Punjab and Haryana High Court related to a rape convict from Karnal in Haryana who had eloped with his lover to get married against the wishes of their family members.
“There is a distinction between the mere breach of a promise, and not fulfilling a false promise,” the court said. “There is a clear distinction between rape and consensual sex and in a case like this, the court must very carefully examine whether the accused had actually wanted to marry the victim, or had malafide motives, and had made a false promise to this effect only to satisfy his lust, as the latter falls within the ambit of cheating or deception,” the
court said.
“Thus, the court must examine whether there was made, at an early stage, a false promise of marriage by the accused and whether the consent involved was given after wholly understanding the nature and consequences of sexual indulgence,” the apex court judges said.
The high court had upheld the Novemebr 13, 1998, order of additional sessions judge, Karnal, convicting Deepak Gulati for kidnapping and raping a woman he allegedly loved and wanted to marry. Gulati was awarded three years’ jail for kidnapping and seven years’ term for committing rape and both sentences were to be served concurrently.
Going into the sequence of the events leading to the alleged rape and subsequently the arrest of Gulati, the apex court said that at every stage the prosecutrix acted on her own voluntarily. IANS
