Women are not "war," says the Supreme Court of India in its adultery law judgment: NPR

The Supreme Court of India overturned a colonial law that made adultery illegal, calling it arbitrary and saying that it is unconstitutional because it "s illegal. she "treats the husband as the master".

Article 497 of the Indian Penal Code incriminates a man to have sex with another man's wife "without the consent or connivance of this man".

The law gives a husband the exclusive right to sue the lover of his wife – and does not grant the wife the power to do the same. It does not penalize the woman or any married man who has sex with an unmarried woman.

The 158-year-old law dates back to the Victorian era, under British colonial rule in India. The punishment for adultery was five years in prison, a fine or both.

Noting that the law is unique in the penal code to treat men and women differently, Chief Justice Dipak Misra said: "The law on adultery is arbitrary and undermines the dignity of women."

He stated that adultery is a ground for divorce, but not jail.

The five-judge court ruled that the law granted a husband's license "to use the woman as a cat".

"It is an archaic law that has long survived its purpose and does not fit with constitutional morality," said the bench in a separate opinion but concordant with that issued by the Chief Justice.

The decision is the latest in an increasingly militant Indian Supreme Court that has done far more than politicians in recent years to reorganize sexual mores and promote gender equality in a deeply conservative society but in the midst of modernization.

Misra, the chief justice, is going to retire next week and the court has made quick stops before he leaves. A large number of decisions are based on testimony heard earlier this year, but only published now.

Earlier this month, the court overturned a longstanding ban on homosexual sex. Last year, judges banned "triple talaq" divorce for Muslim men and in a country where the number of wives is higher than anywhere else in the world, the high court ruled that sexual relations with minor wife constituted rape.

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose center-right coalition is led by the Hindu party Bharatiya Janata, or BJP, strongly opposes the decision to decriminalize adultery. Modi advocated changing the law to make it gender neutral, while maintaining adultery as a criminal offense.

A parliamentary woman of the opposition party, Sushmita Dev, tweeted that the court had made an "excellent decision".

"A law that does not give women the right to sue her adulterous husband and can not be prosecuted herself if she is adulterous is an unequal treatment," she wrote.

The adultery case came after a petition by Joseph Shine, a 41-year-old Indian businessman residing in Italy.

Shine's 45-page petition "generously quotes American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, and former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the equality of women's rights. gender and women's rights, "according to the BBC.

"Married women are not a special case for the prosecution of adultery, they are not in any way different from men," said Shine's petition.