The Supreme Court recently quashed a rape case against a lawyer from Chhattisgarh who was accused of raping a woman on the false promise of marriage [PK vs State of Chhattisgarh]..A Bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan said the woman was already married and her divorce was still pending, so a marriage with the accused was legally impossible.In such circumstances, she could not say she was lured into the relationship on false promise of marriage, the Bench ruled..“On a perusal of the allegations made in the present case, it is an admitted fact that the complainant-respondent No.3, within the first initial meetings, told the accused-appellant that she was a married woman with divorce proceedings pending before the Family Court..... Therefore, in the same breath, she cannot be allowed to claim and allege that she was also coaxed by the accused-appellant into having a physical relationship with him on the false pretext of marriage, as the two facts cannot stand together on the same plane and simultaneously, as both are antagonistic and antithetical to each other,” the Court said..The Court thus set aside the Chhattisgarh High Court order refusing to quash an FIR that accused the lawyer of repeatedly raping the woman under the false promise of marriage.The case stemmed from an FIR registered in Bilaspur in February 2025. The complainant, a 33-year-old advocate with a child, was in a subsisting marriage, though divorce proceedings with her husband were pending. She met the accused, also a lawyer, at a social event in 2022. The two grew close and eventually entered into a physical relationship beginning in September 2022, which is said to have continued till January 2025..According to her complaint, matters escalated after she informed the accused that she was pregnant with his child. On January 27, 2025, she went to his residence to confront him and his family, where she alleged that she was met with hostility, assaulted and threatened. Thereafter, she filed a case of rape under the false promise of marriage.The accused then moved the Chhattisgarh High Court seeking the quashing of the FIR. However, the High Court refused to quash the FIR, saying the allegations required investigation, and at such a nascent stage, it could not be concluded that no offence was made out.Aggrieved by the refusal to quash the case, the accused approached the Supreme Court..The counsel for the accused argued that the complainant had voluntarily entered into the relationship, which continued till January 2025, showing that she was a consenting party and that no offence of rape was made out from the FIR.On the other hand, the State argued that the accused knew that the complaint was going through a matrimonial dispute with her husband and therefore in a pre-planned manner, induced her into a physical relationship on the false promise of marriage without ever intending to honour it.After considering the case, the Court reiterated that a rape charge based on a promise to marry can succeed only if the promise was false from the very beginning and made solely to obtain consent for sex.The Bench said it found no material to attract Section 376(2)(n) of the IPC and instead saw the dispute as a consensual relationship that had later turned bitter.The Court noted that the complainant was already married and had a child. Although divorce proceedings were pending, her marriage was subsisting when the relationship with the accused began in September 2022 and continued thereafter. Since she was legally incapable of marrying him, even a promise of marriage could not have been fulfilled..The Court pointed out that the legal bar on such a marriage flows from Section 5(i) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, which prohibits a person from marrying again while a spouse is living.“In other words, the law prohibits bigamous unions and therefore disallows parties from entering into a second marriage during the subsistence of their first marriage,” the Bench observed..The Court also cautioned that criminal law must not be used to turn failed relationships into rape cases.“In our opinion, the facts of the present case clearly indicate a consensual relationship gone sour, whereas both the parties should have exercised restraint and should have refrained from involving the State into their personal relationship turning rancour,” the Court said while quashing the case..[Read Judgment].Follow Bar and Bench channel on WhatsAppDownload the Bar and Bench Mobile app for instant access to the latest legal news.
