The Centre has no plan to criminalise marital rape due to a variety of factors, including poverty, illiteracy, country’s sensibilities and the fact that marriage is treated as a sacrament in the Indian society. “It is considered that the concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors, including levels of education, illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious beliefs, mindset of the society to treat the marriage as a sacrament,” said Haribhai Parathibhai Chaudhary, Minister of State for Home.
He was replying to a written question of DMK MP Kanimozhi in Rajya Sabha, who had asked the Home Ministry whether the Government is planning to bring a bill to amend the Indian Penal Code to remove the exception of marital rape from the definition of rape; and whether it is a fact that UN Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against women has recommended to India to criminalise marital rape.
She had also said that according to United Nations Population Fund that 75 per cent of the married women in India were subjected to marital rape and whether government has taken cognisance of the fact. Chaudhary said the Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Women and Child Development have reported that UN Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against Women has recommended to India to criminalise marital rape.
“The law Commission of India, while making its 172nd Report on Review of Rape laws did not recommend criminalisation of marital rape by amending the exception to Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code and hence presently there is no proposal to bring any amendment to the IPC in this regard,” the Minister said. In April 2013, the Indian Government passed the Criminal law (amendment) Act, 2013, in response to the December 16 2012 brutal gang-rape and murder of a young para-medic in a moving bus in the national Capital.
The final amendments adopted by the government were based on the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee report, but were diluted. Of the new legislation’s many shortcomings, one of the most disturbing was the retention of an exception to Section 375 of the IPC, which stated: ‘sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape.’
This was much against the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee report, as it said that denying married women their right to consent reduces them to ‘no more than the property of their husbands.’ The Parliamentary Standing Committee that reviewed the Justice Verma recommendations also asserted that criminalising marital rape would be nothing less than an ‘injustice’, destroying the very institution of marriage.
