She lay still. Eyes fixed on the ceiling. Not because she wanted to but because she had learned, over years of marriage, that resistance was futile. Her body was taken without permission. Her protest was swallowed by the same four walls that were supposed to be her sanctuary. When morning came, she cooked breakfast. She smiled at the children. She folded the newspapers. And she told no one because no one would believe her. Because the law did not believe her. Because in India, a husband cannot rape his wife. At least, not according to the statute books.

This is not a rare story. This is not an aberration. This is the lived reality of millions of women across this country, women who wake up every morning inside a marriage that has become a legal license for their violation. And yet, India continues to look away.

I. The Exception That Should Never Have Existed

Exception 2 to Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, now Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023, reads with shocking plainness: sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape. Fourteen words. Fourteen words that have silenced the screams of an unknowable number of women. Fourteen words that the Indian state has, for decades, refused to erase.

This exception did not emerge from Indian thought or Indian philosophy. It was inherited, without question and without shame, from the colonial legal codes drafted under British rule, codes that themselves drew from the medieval English legal doctrine articulated by Sir Matthew Hale in 1736, who declared that a husband cannot be guilty of rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.

Hale’s proposition. It has no legal backing, no scholarly foundation, no moral justification. It was the opinion of one man, offered three centuries ago, in a country that has itself long since abandoned it. England criminalized marital rape in 1991. And yet, here we stand in 2026, bound to the ghost of a dead man’s prejudice.

II. What Marriage Does Not Mean

Let us be precise about what is being argued here because those who oppose the criminalization of marital rape often misrepresent the demand. No one is saying that marriage is a criminal institution. No one is seeking to intrude into the bedroom of a consenting couple. The argument is far simpler, far more elemental: consent does not expire at the altar.

When a woman signs a marriage certificate, she is not signing a blank check for sexual access. She is not surrendering her body to perpetual availability. She is not waiving the right that belongs to every human being, the right to say no. The right to have that no respected. The right to be heard.

Consider the cruelty of the current position. Under Indian law, a stranger who forces himself upon a woman is a rapist and faces rigorous imprisonment. But a husband who does the same thing, in the same manner, causing the same trauma, is simply exercising a legal right. The law, in its grotesque logic, makes the identity of the perpetrator the determining factor of the crime. It says: it is not what was done to you that matters. What matters is who did it to you.

Can there be a more complete betrayal of the principle of equality? Can there be a clearer statement that a married woman is, before the law, less than a person?

III. The Constitutional Wound

The Constitution of India is not merely a document of governance. It is a promise, a promise made to every citizen that they are equal, that they are free, that their dignity is inviolable. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law. Article 15 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Article 21 protects life and personal liberty in its fullest, most expansive sense.

The marital rape exception violates all three, not in a technical, academic sense, but in a deeply human, bleeding sense. It says to married women: you are not equal to unmarried women. Your body has lesser protection. Your autonomy has lesser value. The Constitution speaks of dignity; this law spits on it.

The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India established beyond doubt that the right to privacy, including sexual autonomy, is a fundamental right under Article 21. The Court declared that decisional autonomy, the right to make intimate choices free from coercive state or private intrusion, is at the core of human dignity. If this is true for every other woman, it must be true for married women too. Marriage cannot be a zone of constitutional exception.

In 2022, the Delhi High Court delivered a divided verdict on a petition challenging the marital rape exception, with Justice Rajiv Shakdher striking it down as unconstitutional and Justice C. Hari Shankar upholding it. The split bench sent the question to the Supreme Court, where it remains pending, a wound left open, bleeding quietly, while women continue to suffer.

IV. The Arguments That Refuse to Die

Those who oppose criminalization offer a familiar arsenal of arguments. They deserve to be met, not dismissed, but dismantled.

“It will destroy the institution of marriage.”
The institution of marriage rests on love, trust, and mutual respect. A marriage in which a husband forces himself upon a non-consenting wife is not an institution worth protecting. It is a cage. The law should protect marriages; it should not protect the cage.

“False cases will be filed.”
This argument could be made against every criminal law in existence. Women file false cases of dowry harassment; should we repeal Section 498A? The possibility of misuse has never been and must never be a reason to deny protection to victims. The answer to potential misuse is careful investigation, fair trial, and robust safeguards, not the abolition of the crime itself.

“It cannot be proved.”
Rape is always difficult to prove, that is the nature of a crime committed in intimacy. The difficulty of proof is not unique to marital rape. And yet we do not use the difficulty of proof in other rape cases to argue those cases should not be criminal. The law must speak, even when evidence is hard to gather. The speaking of the law matters because it tells every woman that what was done to her has a name, and that name is a crime.

“India is not ready.”
One wonders what readiness means in this context. Is it readiness of the perpetrators? Are we to wait until husbands are ready to accept that their wives have rights? Or is it readiness of society, which is merely another word for the slow grinding of prejudice posing as culture? Justice is not a guest who waits to be invited. It must sometimes arrive uninvited.

V. The Silence That Kills

What does legal silence do to a victim? It does not merely fail to help her. It actively harms her. When the law says that what happened to her is not a crime, it tells her that her suffering does not count. It tells her that she imagined it, or deserved it, or that the sanctity of her marriage is worth more than the sanctity of her body. The law, in its silence, becomes complicit.

Research and survivor accounts across the country reveal that marital sexual violence is among the most prevalent and the least reported forms of gender-based violence in India. Women endure years, sometimes decades, of forced intimacy, not because they do not know it is wrong, but because they have no recourse. They cannot go to the police. They cannot go to court. They can only go home. Back to the same bed. Back to the same man. Back to the same silence.

The psychological consequences of marital rape are as devastating as those of rape by a stranger and in many ways more so. The violation comes from someone trusted. Someone loved, perhaps. Someone whose face you see every morning. The betrayal is layered and compounded. Studies in psychology and trauma consistently show that victims of intimate partner sexual violence experience higher rates of depression, PTSD, and suicidal ideation than victims of stranger rape. They recover more slowly. They trust less. They carry the wound in a place the world cannot see.

And yet the law tells these women: nothing happened to you. You have no remedy. You have no voice. You are invisible.

VI. The World Has Already Decided

This is not a novel legal question. The world has grappled with it and most of the world has answered it. Over 150 countries have criminalized marital rape. The United States did so in every state by 1993. The United Kingdom in 1991. South Africa in 1993. Nepal in 2006. Even Pakistan, often cited in Indian discourse as a conservative counterpoint, has provisions under its laws that allow prosecution of sexual violence within marriage under certain frameworks.

India stands in a dwindling minority. A minority that includes some of the most authoritarian and gender-regressive states on earth. Is this the company India wishes to keep? Is this the legacy the world’s largest democracy wishes to leave?

India that gave the world the concept of Ahimsa, non-violence, cannot, in good conscience, sanction violence within the home. India that speaks of the goddess in every woman cannot, with any integrity, deny legal protection to women within marriage. The contradiction is not merely legal. It is civilizational.

VII. What Reform Looks Like

The path forward is clear, even if the political will to walk it has been absent. The marital rape exception must be struck down, either by the Supreme Court exercising its constitutional authority, or by Parliament demonstrating the courage that has so far eluded it.

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 of 2023 was an opportunity squandered. When Parliament undertook a comprehensive revision of the criminal law, advocates, legal scholars, and women’s rights organizations across the country urged the government to use this moment of legal renewal to finally remove the exception. The government declined. The exception survived the rewrite, dressed in new numbering, but unchanged in its cruelty.

Reform must go beyond striking down the exception. It must be accompanied by training of police and judiciary to handle such cases with sensitivity; by the creation of dedicated support systems for survivors; by public education that reframes marriage not as ownership but as partnership. Law reform without social support is a door opened to a room that has not yet been built.

But the law must go first. Because the law is not merely a mechanism of punishment. It is a declaration of values. It tells citizens what this society considers wrong, what it considers worthy of protection, what it considers sacred. When the law finally says, unambiguously, loudly, without exception, that a woman’s body belongs to her and her alone, regardless of her marital status, it will do something that no policy can do: it will tell every woman in this country that she matters.

VIII. Ending the Silence

Return, for a moment, to the woman in the opening lines of this article. The one who lay still. The one who stared at the ceiling. The one who folded the newspapers and told no one.

She exists. In villages and cities, in apartments and farmhouses, in rich households and poor ones, across castes and communities and religions. She is not a metaphor. She is not a statistic. She is a human being, a wife, a mother, a daughter, and she is being failed by the very legal system that was created to protect her.

The law’s silence on marital rape is not a neutral position. Silence in the face of harm is complicity. It is a choice, made again and again, by Parliament, by policymakers, by those who confuse tradition with justice, to protect the perpetrator over the victim, the institution over the individual, the comfort of the powerful over the dignity of the powerless.

A just legal system does not ask women to choose between their marriage and their safety. It does not tell them that their suffering is legal. It does not write exceptions into the law that carve out zones of impunity for those who abuse the intimacy of the marital bed.

The time for silence is over. The time for the law to speak, clearly, courageously, and without exception, is long overdue. Every day that the marital rape exception survives is another day that the Indian state tells its women: your dignity is negotiable. Your body has terms and conditions. Your suffering has an asterisk.

It does not. It never did. And it is time the law said so.

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