Criminal Law

Independent Thought v. Union of India

(2017) 10 SCC 800

Facts

Section 375 IPC generally treated sexual intercourse with a girl below eighteen as rape regardless of consent.
Exception 2 created a marital exception where the wife was not below fifteen years of age.
This meant that intercourse by a husband with his wife aged between fifteen and eighteen was excluded from rape, even though:
she was legally a child;
the age of consent was eighteen;
child-protection legislation applied to persons below eighteen.
Independent Thought, a child-rights organisation, challenged this inconsistency.
The case focused only on minor wives and did not require determination of marital rape involving adult wives.

Whether Exception 2 was unconstitutional insofar as it protected intercourse with a wife aged fifteen to eighteen.
Whether marriage could reduce the protection available to a girl child.
How the IPC should be harmonised with POCSO and child-marriage laws.

A person below eighteen is a child for the relevant protective statutes.
Marriage does not remove:
bodily integrity;
dignity;
health;
statutory protection against sexual abuse.
A classification between married and unmarried girl children must satisfy Article 14.
Courts should harmonise conflicting provisions to advance child protection.
A statutory exception cannot arbitrarily expose one category of children to conduct criminal when committed against every other child.

An unmarried girl under eighteen was fully protected against sexual intercourse.
A married girl of the same age received substantially less protection solely because of marriage.
The distinction had no rational connection with child welfare.
Early sexual intercourse can cause:
physical injury;
pregnancy-related danger;
psychological harm;
loss of education and autonomy.
These risks do not disappear after a child marriage.
The marital exception also conflicted with POCSO, which criminalised sexual acts with every person under eighteen.
Reading the exception literally would produce a legal contradiction:
the same act could be rape under child-protection law;
yet exempt under the IPC because the accused was the husband.
The Court refused to treat child marriage as permission for sexual access.
It read down the exception by replacing the age of fifteen with eighteen.
The Court carefully limited the ruling:
it protected minor wives;
it did not decide the broader constitutional challenge to the marital-rape exception for adult women.
The interpretation ensured equal protection for all girl children.

The Supreme Court held that sexual intercourse by a man with his wife below eighteen constitutes rape.
Exception 2 was read down to apply only where the wife was not below eighteen.
The judgment operated prospectively and did not decide adult marital rape.
Use this case for: marriage cannot deprive a girl child of statutory protection against rape, and the marital exception does not apply to wives below eighteen.