Twice in as many weeks, the Supreme Court has expressed its disapproval at the Allahabad high court. The most recent was over a bail order to a rape accused where the high court made a gratuitous and misogynistic observation that a woman had “herself invited trouble” for being raped after drinking at a bar. “Bail can be granted,” the apex court observed, “but what is this discussion that she herself invited trouble?”

Earlier, the Supreme Court had intervened in another Allahabad high court judgment that found the action of two men in grabbing an 11-year-old girl’s breasts, breaking the string of her pyjamas and dragging her under a culvert could not be seen as an attempt to rape. The girl was fortunately saved by the intervention of passersby and the Supreme Court has stayed the order.

The temptation by judges to attach moral homilies when adjudicating on rape cases goes back all the way to the 1974 Mathura judgment of a........

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