“It’s just insignificant, in my opinion, which is sad.” These are the words of 20 year-old Vaishnavi Pandey, from Mumbai, now living in London, when asked on her thoughts about the impact of the removal of Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalised adultery. The 20 year-old was unaware of the existence of the law and what it entailed.
Until September 2018, a man could be sentenced up to five years in prison for sleeping with another man’s wife. Dr Mayur Suresh is a law lecturer at SOAS University who also used to practice law and marital law in New Delhi, India. He explains that the law only applied to men and that a woman’s consent is irrelevant because of how it’s framed.
“So man A sleeps with man B’s wife, the logic being in this section, that the woman is the property of man B’s wife. So, man A is kind of trespassing so to speak, to use a bad metaphor.” Unlike criminal law cases, only one person could legitimately prosecute someone for the crime of adultery which was the husband of the wife. “Even the wife couldn’t complain that her husband was being adulterous with someone else,” says Suresh.
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