By Samikhsya Bureau
First it was regarding the decriminalisation of ‘extra-marital’ relationship. Now a step ahead, live-in partnership pregnancy, and then there is no rape if one fails to marry. It is difficult to foresee the consequences but it can not go well.
People may go by such free-thinking lifestyle or not but it requires extraordinary foresight to assess the stark difference between ‘breach of promise to marry or rather than a false promise to marry’. A very queer jigsaw puzzle a normal human mind can exercise to make out in circumstances when two individuals in love and live-in together fed on passion.
In such circumstances, consensual sex seems normal but it becomes an offence when one refuses to marry. And once it has happened, who can discover the audio recording of the breach of promise to marry or false promise to marry? What, in fact, is that mechanism to ascertain the virtue of that promise.
Love, live-in relationship and then physical intimacy is always the result of tempestuous desires that regards for no boundary but once the outcome is in the fore, many fingers keep pointing at the women and subsequently the offspring, if the relationship does not last.
Within any close-door privacy, if the man has not tried to seduce the partner to indulge in sexual intimacy, merely with the intention to derive that momentary pleasure, even if he had promised to marry or a false promise ‘such an act would not amount to rape’ . Then why do we look at the live-in partners in isolation .
The doctor from Maharastra in question and the nurse, where the latter was the prosecutrix , had confessed to keeping physical intimacy when the doctor had already made a promise, either false or not, to marry her. The doctor married elsewhere and the live-in partner was in the court.
In normal love affairs between boys and girls or, man or woman, similar promises are purportedly made to the partner. But once the woman become pregnant and denied a marriage as promised, either she resorts to some extreme step like suicide or protest. Perhaps, prevention can be the best cure rather than measuring everything by legal integral calculus.
