THE RATIO. One judgment, decoded twice: once for anyone, once for the profession.

Headnote

A man accused of concealing an earlier marriage, then subjecting a second woman to cruelty and dowry harassment, argued the criminal law protecting wives from cruelty could not reach him because his relationship with her was never a valid marriage in the first place. The Supreme Court has rejected that defence, holding that a provision written to protect women from cruelty within a marital household cannot be read to abandon a woman who suffered identical cruelty simply because no wedding ever took place, provided the relationship genuinely carried the character of marriage and both parties intended to marry.

Factual Background

Dr. Lokesh B.H. and the second respondent married according to Hindu custom in 2010 and lived together in Bengaluru. The relationship broke down in 2016, and two criminal complaints followed, leading to charges under Section 498A IPC in one case, and under Section 498A along with charges of criminal intimidation, attempted murder, bigamy and dowry demands in the other. At the centre of the dispute was a basic factual question: had the parties ever actually been validly married. The appellant said no. The Karnataka High Court, considering his petition to quash both prosecutions, found that he had concealed an earlier marriage and had presented himself to the second respondent as her husband regardless, and held that Section 498A protects a woman in this position whether or not the underlying marriage was technically valid. Dr. Lokesh appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Question for Determination

Section 498A IPC makes it a crime for a “husband or the relative of the husband” to subject a woman to cruelty. The word “husband” is not defined in the section. The question was whether that word should be read strictly, to mean only a man in a legally valid marriage, or whether it should be read purposively, to also reach a man in a live-in relationship that carries the essential character of a marriage, even where no valid marriage in law exists.

The Union of India, intervening in support of a strict reading, argued that women in this position are not left without a remedy, since the civil law protections in the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 already cover relationships in the nature of marriage. If that were correct, the argument continued, there would be no real gap for a broader reading of Section 498A to fill.

The Court’s Reasoning

The Court began by clarifying what strict construction of a penal statute actually requires. Reviewing a long line of authority, it held that strict interpretation is not the same as rigid literalism. It requires the court to stay within the plain meaning of the words used, but not to adopt a reading so narrow that it defeats the evident purpose of the provision or produces an absurd result. Purposive interpretation, the Court held, exists precisely to prevent that outcome in legislation designed to remedy a specific social problem, and the two approaches are not as opposed to each other as they might first appear.

Turning to Section 498A specifically, the Court traced its history. It was introduced in 1983 in response to rising dowry deaths, at a time when the only real legal tool available was a narrow provision targeting dowry demands specifically, leaving a wide range of domestic cruelty entirely unaddressed. The Court had already, two decades ago, held in Reema Aggarwal v Anupam that a man could not escape Section 498A simply by pointing to the invalidity of his own marriage, since allowing that would let a wrongdoer hide behind a defect he himself created. The Court also catalogued its own repeated warnings, across many recent decisions, that Section 498A is frequently misused as a tool of harassment and negotiation rather than genuine protection, a concern it held in mind throughout the rest of its analysis.

The Court then distinguished “live-in relationship,” a broad, everyday description of two people sharing a household, from “relationship in the nature of marriage,” a narrower legal category already developed under the Domestic Violence Act. Not every live-in relationship qualifies. Courts look to factors including the length of the relationship, a shared household, pooled finances, domestic roles, a sexual relationship, children, and whether the couple held themselves out to society as a married couple, none of which is decisive alone.

Rejecting the argument that the Domestic Violence Act already provides sufficient protection, the Court held that Act to be substantially civil in character. Its central remedies are protection orders, residence rights and monetary relief. Only a breach of an existing protection order carries a criminal penalty, and even that requires a prior civil order to already be in place. Treating civil remedies as equivalent to the direct criminal deterrence Section 498A provides, the Court held, misunderstands how differently the two systems actually operate and what they can each achieve.

The most significant part of the judgment turns to the Constitution directly. The Court set out a deliberately simple illustration: a woman who marries a man, and a woman who instead chooses to live with him without marrying, suffer identical cruelty at the hands of the same family in otherwise identical circumstances. Under a strict reading of Section 498A, only the first woman is protected. The Court held that distinguishing between these two women, for the specific purpose of protecting them from domestic cruelty, has no rational connection to what the provision is actually meant to achieve, since cruelty within a household does not depend on whether a wedding ceremony took place. On that basis, confining Section 498A to formally married women was held to violate the guarantee of equal protection under Article 14 of the Constitution, and the right to choose one’s own partner was held to be part of personal liberty and dignity under Article 21.

Having found the narrower reading constitutionally deficient, the Court held that Section 498A extends to a woman in a relationship in the nature of marriage, with the word “husband” read purposively to reach the man in that relationship.

Critical Assessment

The judgment adds one significant limiting condition to its own holding: the relationship must have carried an actual intent to marry, not merely the outward appearance of marriage, and the burden of proving that intent falls on the woman seeking protection. This is a sensible safeguard against catching every live-in relationship regardless of its seriousness, but it reintroduces, through the back door of evidence, some of the very uncertainty the constitutional analysis was meant to remove. Intent to marry is a subjective state of mind, often undocumented precisely because the couple never in fact married. A relationship that satisfies every objective indicator, years together, a shared home, children, public acknowledgment as a couple, could still fall outside the section if the man simply denies ever having intended marriage and the woman cannot produce evidence to the contrary. The judgment resolves the constitutional problem of treating identical cruelty differently, but leaves a genuinely difficult evidentiary problem in its place.

There is also a tension the Court names but does not fully resolve. It devotes real space to its own repeated warnings, across a string of recent decisions, that Section 498A is already misused as a tool of harassment, arrest of elderly or distant relatives, and pressure tactics in matrimonial disputes rather than protection from genuine cruelty. Having laid that record out, the Court proceeds to widen the pool of relationships to which the same provision applies, and addresses the resulting risk mainly by extending existing arrest safeguards, a checklist before arrest, magistrate scrutiny, contempt liability for non-compliance, to live-in cases as well. Those safeguards govern how and when police may arrest someone. They do nothing to narrow who can now be accused in the first place, which is precisely where the judgment’s own cited statistics suggest the deeper problem with the provision has always lain.

Set against both of these concerns, the Article 14 reasoning at the centre of the judgment is genuinely well constructed. Holding every other fact constant, the same people, the same household, the same conduct, and isolating the single variable of whether a wedding ceremony occurred, is a clean and disciplined way to test whether a legal line actually serves the purpose it claims to serve. It is difficult to construct a good faith justification for protecting one woman from a given act of cruelty and not the other that does not simply restate the formal marital distinction as its own reason, which is no justification at all. Whatever view one takes of where the resulting boundary should sit, the method used to get there is sound constitutional reasoning, not result driven improvisation.

Implications

If you’re not a lawyer: if you are in a long term, committed live-in relationship in India, and it carries the genuine character of a marriage, shared home, shared life, mutual acknowledgment as partners, this case confirms that the criminal law against domestic cruelty can protect you, not only a legally married spouse. That protection is not automatic. It depends on showing that both people genuinely intended to marry, not simply that they lived together, so keeping any evidence of that intent, communications, family involvement, plans made together, may matter a great deal if a relationship of this kind later turns abusive. Equally, if you are the one facing an accusation, the Supreme Court has also insisted, in this same judgment, that arrest cannot be automatic and must follow the same careful safeguards that already apply to married couples.

For the profession: this is now the leading authority extending Section 498A IPC to relationships in the nature of marriage, and it does so through a genuine constitutional holding, not obiter, grounding the extension in Article 14 as well as purposive statutory construction, which gives it real doctrinal weight beyond this specific provision. The added requirement of an intent to marry, with the burden resting on the complainant, is the key battleground the judgment creates for future litigation, and practitioners on either side should focus fact development there: documented plans, family introductions, and joint long term commitments for the prosecution, and evidence of a deliberately open-ended or non-marital arrangement for the defence. The judgment expressly confines its reasoning to Section 498A and does not extend the same interpretation to any other provision, so arguments seeking to import this holding into bigamy, maintenance, or succession contexts elsewhere in the Code will need to establish that extension afresh. The Arnesh Kumar arrest safeguards are now explicitly mandatory in these cases too, and any arrest made without the required preliminary enquiry is a ready ground for challenge.

Case Details

  • Citation: Criminal Appeal(s) arising out of SLP (Crl.) Nos. 2240-2241 of 2026
  • Court: Supreme Court of India, Criminal Appellate Jurisdiction. Sanjay Karol J and Nongmeikapam Kotiswar Singh J
  • On appeal from: Common judgment of the High Court of Karnataka at Bengaluru, dated 18 November 2025, in Criminal Petition Nos. 8134 of 2024 and 9412 of 2021
  • Decided: 3 August 2026
  • Counsel: Mr Anand Sanjay M. Nuli, Senior Advocate, for the appellant. Mr Brijender Chahar, Additional Solicitor General, for the State of Karnataka. Ms Hetu Arora Sethi for respondent no. 2. Ms Aishwarya Bhati, Additional Solicitor General, and Ms Nina R. Nariman, as amicus curiae
  • Key precedents applied: Reema Aggarwal v Anupam, (2004) 3 SCC 199 · Rajinder Singh v State of Punjab, (2015) 6 SCC 477 · D. Velusamy v D. Patchaiammal, (2010) 10 SCC 469 · Indra Sarma v V.K.V. Sarma, (2013) 15 SCC 755 · Arnesh Kumar v State of Bihar, (2014) 8 SCC 273 · K.S. Puttaswamy v Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1
  • Key paragraphs: [9] (rejecting strict, marriage-only construction) · [15]-[18] (the Article 14 analysis) · [20]-[21] (the holding, and the intent-to-marry safeguard) · [23] (formal conclusions)