The Criminalisation of Marital Rape in India: Need for Legal Reform

For decades, the legal architecture of Indian criminal law has shielded a profound violation of bodily integrity behind the sanctity of the wedding vow. When India replaced its colonial-era Indian Penal Code (IPC) with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) in 2024, the nation missed a critical opportunity to fix one of its most glaring human rights anomalies. While the statutory numbering shifted, moving the definition of rape from Section 375 of the IPC to Section 63 of the BNS, the text preserved a historic injustice: the marital rape exception. Under the current legal framework, sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, provided she is not under eighteen years of age, is explicitly excluded from the definition of rape. This legal immunity treats a married woman’s consent as an unretractable commodity, creating a systemic gap where wives are denied state protection against sexual violence perpetrated within their own homes. Criminalising marital rape is no longer just an academic debate; it is an urgent legislative necessity to align Indian law with constitutional morality, human rights standards, and modern understandings of individual autonomy.