India Supreme Court strikes down adultery as criminal offence law

INDIA’S SUPREME Court has struck down a 158-year-old law that treated adultery in certain cases as a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison.

The decision is the latest involving India’s Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who has presided over a string of verdicts in recent weeks that grant more rights to women, gay couples and religious minorities, challenging deeply conservative Indian society as he prepares to retire from the bench next month.

Chief Justice Dipak Misra and the rest of the five-member court called the law, which did not allow a wife to prosecute an adulterous husband, unconstitutional and noted that a “husband is not the master of woman”.

Adultery can still be grounds for divorce in India, the verdict said, but a criminal penalty violated women’s protection to equal rights under the law. The verdict was hailed by activists and left-ofcentre members of India’s parliament.

“Excellent decision,” tweeted Sushmita Dev, a politician and president of the opposition Congress Party’s women’s wing.

She added that “a law that does not give women the right to sue her adulterer husband ... is unequal treatment and militates against her status as an individual”.

Earlier this month, the Misraled court also struck down a colonial-era law that made gay sex punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The 1861 law, a relic of Victorian England that hung on long after the end of British colonialism, was “a breach of the rights of privacy and dignity”, the court ruled.

It added that “history owes an apology to the members of this community and their families.”