India’s refusal to criminalise marital rape rests on a premise that is rarely stated plainly but widely enforced: that consent, once given at marriage, is permanent. This idea ~ embedded in law, reinforced by custom, and normalised in households ~ turns a private relationship into a zone of diminished rights. The consequences are not abstract. They are lived, negotiated, and often endured in silence.

The legal architecture still carries the imprint of colonial-era thinking, where marriage was treated as a contract subsuming individual autonomy. Despite constitutional guarantees, the exception persists, effectively placing married women outside the full protection of sexual violence laws within marriage. This creates a hierarchy of citizenship within the home: what is criminal outside it becomes permissible within. Opposition to reform often invokes the sanctity of marriage or fears of misuse. These concerns deserve to be heard but not allowed to dominate the debate.

Every criminal law carries the risk of misuse; the answer has never been to deny protection altogether. By that logic, large parts of the penal code........

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