The Karnataka High Court.
Credit: DH File Photo.
The statute under BNS section 69 (employing deceitful means including a promise of marriage) punishes deceit, not disappointment; fraud, not failed affection, and exploitation, not the collapse of relationship, according to the High Court of Karnataka.
Justice M Nagaprasanna noted this while quashing a rape case against a Bengaluru advocate and two of his close relatives, observing that the complaint “bears a strong imprint of manipulation and of an attempt to convert private discord into public prosecution”.
The woman had alleged that the advocate developed a physical relationship with her after promising to marry her, but cheated her later. On December 9, 2024, the Byadarahalli police in Bengaluru registered an FIR under various provisions of BNS, mainly for rape, physical relationship employing deceitful means including a promise of marriage, without intention of fulfilment and by cheating.
The advocate submitted that he had met the complainant in 2023 in a case concerning the Negotiable Instruments Act and contended that there was no physical relationship. He called it a “concocted” story.
Pointing out that the woman was married twice, he argued that a person already married cannot project physical relationship on the promise of marriage. The court perused the documents placed on record.
The complainant had first married in 2014 and divorced on October 22, 2016.
Long after the annulment of this marriage, on August 21, 2020, she gave birth to a child, and the birth certificate depicted the name of her first husband as the father. The court pointed out another birth certificate about the child born on December 15, 2008, where another person was stated to be the father.
The court also perused another document placed on record in which the complainant had filed a case in 2023 before the chief judicial magistrate, Bengaluru Rural, describing herself as the wife of the person she had divorced in 2016.
“When all these facts, borne out from official records, are considered cumulatively, it becomes difficult to comprehend, far less accept, how the complainant could credibly assert that she consented to sexual relationship on a “promise of marriage”, when she appears to have been in a subsisting marital relationship or at the very least, in a continuing domestic association, and is also mother of 2 children, one about 13 years old and the other about 4 years,” Justice M Nagaprasanna said.
The court said that the complainant attempted to create a narrative of cheating by implicating the other members of the petitioner’s family.
“The settled position of law is that breach of a promise to marry, howsoever morally questionable, is not per se cheating in the criminal sense, unless dishonest intention at the inception is established, which is conspicuously absent in the case at hand,” Justice Nagaprasanna said.