Delhi High Court strongly criticized the outdated view of women as property while deciding a 2010 adultery case. Referring to Draupadi from Mahabharat, the Court highlighted how such thinking still haunts society.
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NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court gave a strong message that women should not be treated like property, just like what happened to Draupadi in the Mahabharat.
The court said this while hearing a case from 2010 that was related to adultery under Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which has now been removed from the law.
On April 17, Justice Neena Bansal Krishna said that even though the Mahabharat clearly shows how badly Draupadi was treated and the terrible results that followed, society still often thinks that women are the property of men.
This old thinking still exists today.
“The woman being considered as the property of the husband and its devastating consequences are well documented in Mahabharat wherein Draupadi was put on stake in a game of gamble by none other than her own husband Yudhishtra where other four brothers were the silent spectators and Draupadi had no voice to protest for her dignity. As it happened, she was lost in the game of gamble and what followed was the great war of Mahabharat leading to mass loss of lives and wiping out of many of the family members. Despite having such example to demonstrate the consequence of absurdity of treating of a woman as a chattel, the misogynistic mindset of our Society understood this only when the Apex Court declared Section 497 IPC as unconstitutional in the case of Joseph Shine (supra),”
-the Court said.
Earlier, Section 497 IPC made adultery a crime, but only the man involved in an affair with a married woman could be punished. If the husband allowed the affair, then no crime was committed. This law treated women like property, which is why the Supreme Court struck it down in 2018.
The current case started in 2010. A husband, who got married in 1998, found out that his wife was having an affair with another man. He saw her call records and noticed that she used to talk to the man late at night. Later, he discovered that his wife stayed with that man overnight at a hotel in Lucknow.
The husband first sent his wife a legal notice asking her to stop the affair. After that, he filed a criminal complaint against the man she was involved with. The trial court let the man go, saying there was no clear proof that any sexual relationship happened. However, the Sessions Court reversed this and said the man should face trial.
Then, the man moved to the Delhi High Court and asked it to cancel the summons issued against him.
Meanwhile, the woman got divorced from her husband in 2016.
The High Court had to decide whether the 2018 Supreme Court ruling in the Joseph Shine case (which removed Section 497 IPC) should also apply to this old case from 2010. The Court said yes, the ruling would apply even to older pending cases.
“This aspect has been considered in the judgment Maj. Genl. A.S. Gauraya & Anr. Vs. S.N. Thakur 1986 AIR 1440 wherein the Apex Court had held that declaration of law by the Supreme Court applies to all the pending proceedings even with retrospective effect,”
-the Court said.
The High Court also agreed with the earlier view that just because a woman stayed overnight in a hotel room with a man, it cannot be assumed they had sexual relations.
“The gravamen of Section 497 is that they must have indulged in the act of adultery i.e. they must have had sexual intercourse for which there is no oral or documentary evidence, but is based on a presumption which cannot be considered prima facie for summoning of the Petitioner. The essential ingredients of Section 497 IPC, were therefore, not made out,”
-the Court held.
Because of this, the Delhi High Court canceled the order that had asked the accused man to appear in court and removed him from the case.
In this case:
- Advocate Satish Kumar represented the husband.
- Advocate JS Rawat appeared for the accused man.
- Additional Public Prosecutor Meenakshi Dahiya represented the State.
This ruling is a reminder of how the law is slowly moving away from old ideas that treated women unfairly and is now focused on equality and dignity for all.
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