‘Failure of love is not a crime’: Odisha HC quashes rape charges against cop, quotes Simone de Beauvoir

The Odisha High Court has quashed a rape complaint filed by a woman against her partner of nine years. The Odisha HC observed that the relationship not culminating into marriage could be a source of personal grievance, but ‘failure of love is not a crime’. The woman was in a relationship with a police sub-inspector for nine years.

The woman had filed a complaint with the Sub-Divisional Judicial Magistrate in Bolangir district in 2021, accusing the police officer of rape under the false promise of marriage. According to a Hindustan Times report, the woman also alleged that the police inspector had administered emergency contraceptives to her in an attempt to prevent pregnancy.

“The law does not extend its protection to every broken promise nor does it impose criminality upon every failed relationship. The petitioner and the prosecutrix entered into a relationship in 2012, when both were competent, consenting adults, capable of making their own choices, of exercising their own will, and of shaping their own futures. That the relationship did not culminate in marriage may be a source of personal grievance, but the failure of love is not a crime, nor does the law transform disappointment into deception,” Hindustan Times quoted Justice Sanjeeb Panigrahi said in his February 14 verdict.

In 2023, the woman approached a family court in Sambalpur, seeking a declaration that she was the legally married wife of the sub-inspector. She also requested an injunction to prevent him from marrying anyone else. The woman claimed that they had solemnized their marriage at Samaleswari Temple in Sambalpur and had applied for marriage registration under the Special Marriage Act. However, the man failed to appear in court in March 2021, which was a scheduled appearance related to their marriage registration.

“The law does not extend its protection to every broken promise nor does it impose criminality upon every failed relationship. The man and the woman entered into a relationship in 2012, when both were competent, consenting adults, capable of making their own choices, of exercising their own will, and of shaping their own futures,” the Odisha High Court said.

“The concept of sexual autonomy, a woman’s right to make independent and uncoerced decisions about her body, sexuality, and relationships, has been a site of continuous contestation within feminist philosophy. Marriage, in a patriarchal society, has been reduced to a mere performative act, reinforcing the notion that female sexuality must be bound to male commitment. It is a legal construct, a deliberate compact between two individuals who elect to bind their futures together under the sanction of law. It is not the inexorable destination of passion, nor the predetermined consequence of intimacy. To conflate the two is to imprison human relationships within archaic expectations, to deny individuals, especially women, their right to autonomy, to choice, to the pursuit of desire unshackled by social decree,” justice Panigrahi said.

“Feminist philosophy has long waged battle against the tyranny of expectation, the insidious notion that a woman’s sexual agency is valid only when tethered to marriage. Simone de Beauvoir, a renowned French existentialist philosopher, feminist theorist, and writer, in her seminal work The Second Sex, unmasked the historical subjugation embedded in this expectation. It is this fiction of destiny that the law must resist. The presumption that a woman engages in intimacy only as a prelude to marriage, that her consent to one act is but a silent pledge to another, is a vestige of patriarchal thought, not a principle of justice. The law cannot lend itself to such a perversion of choice, where failed relationships become grounds for legal redress, and disappointment is cloaked in the language of deception", the HT report quoted Justice Panigrahi.