For a country that reveres marriage as a sacred bond, India's silence on marital rape remains one of its most unsettling contradictions. In the eyes of the law, a husband's right to his wife's body still overshadows her right to autonomy. Section 63 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita, which defines rape, explicitly exempts intercourse by a man with his wife (if she is above 18) from the crime of rape.The message sent? Consent, when placed within marriage, becomes irrelevant.
The persistence of this legal exception is not merely a matter of oversight, but a reflection of deeply embedded patriarchal norms that conflate marriage with ownership. Historically, women were treated as extensions of male authority, their consent presumed perpetual and their personhood subsumed by marital duty. The law's failure to criminalise marital rape is thus not a neutral omission but a conscious preservation of a social order where the private sphere is immune to the principles of equality and justice.
Opponents of criminalisation often argue that such a law would “destabilise the institution of marriage in India” or be misused for revenge. But this very reasoning mistakes accountability for instability. If a relationship has the ability to survive only by denying one partner's autonomy, it is not a marriage worth protecting but rather a system worth dismantling. Moreover, the fear of misuse cannot justify the absence of justice, by that logic, no law against violence could ever exist. The legal systems function not because they eliminate all falsehoods but because they uphold principles that protect the vulnerable.
The moral question, then, is stark, should the law recognise a woman's right to bodily autonomy only until the day she marries? To treat marriage as a perpetual consent contract is to deny women the right to say no within the very space where intimacy should be most voluntary. The exemption reduces wives to legal dependents rather than equal citizens, violating not only constitutional guarantees of equality and dignity but also India's commitments under international human rights conventions.
Change, however, cannot rely on legality alone. The struggle against marital rape is also a struggle against silence, against the normalisation of suffering as a duty, of fear as fidelity. Many women do not speak not because they are unaware of injustice, but because they have been taught that endurance is virtue. A law, while not a direct remedy, would at least affirm that violation within marriage is not less grievous than violation outside it. It would mark a shift from viewing wives as property to recognising them as human beings.
True intimacy cannot exist without choice, and no social custom can supersede a woman's right to her own body. The law must stop confusing marital status with moral surrender. Justice, after all, is not meant to preserve comfort, it is meant to confront power.
Author is aspiring Law student and writer exploring gender and constitutional justice.
Views Are Personal.