Arvind Kala: Thy neighbour's wife

The Rajasthan High Court has declared that a married woman who moves into her lover's house has every right to do so. Though progressive, the judgement wouldn't help her or him. He'd go to jail for five years under India's current adultery law and she'd end up without her lover and her husband. This is because Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code doesn't punish a man if he has an affair with a single woman over 18, a divorcee or a widow. But when he goes to bed with a married woman, he's punished for violating her husband's proprietary rights over his wife. She isn't culpable. She goes scot-free even if she tells the court that she seduced him. This absurdity of a consensual sex act being a crime for a man but not for a woman violates a fundamental right in the Constitution which forbids discrimination on the grounds of sex. But India persists with an 1860 British colonial law that the British themselves discarded decades ago.

The adultery law is full of anomalies. It's is ostensibly pro-women, but it ends up as pro-husband. His wife's lover is punished. But if the lover was himself married, what about his wife's rights? She ends up alone, her straying husband in jail, while his partner in adultery, the married woman, remains free. It's hard to see justice in a law which punishes the adulterer but not the adulteress.

Western societies from North America and Europe to Australia prescribe no penalties for adultery. Nor does the more traditional China which legalised adultery 26 years ago. All these societies see consensual sex between adult men and women as a purely private affair. Though 23 states in the US still have long-time laws against adultery, the laws are almost never enforced. But wherever they are, the law applies to both men and women, as it does in South Korea or Turkey. India is the only major country where an adultery law punishes men, but not women. And the punishment is draconian, five years in jail, compared to one year in Cambodia or South Korea, or a $250 fine in the US state of Virginia.

Girija Vyas, president of the National Commission for Women, rejects the idea of India's adultery law applying to women on the ground that they are usually victims in an adulterous relationship. That might have been true in a cruel feudal age when the adultery law was enacted 147 years ago. Today however, the body language of tens of thousands of pillion-riding girls wrapped around their boyfriends on motorcycles suggests that willing sex outside marriage is rampant in India. To presume that urban Indian women are sati-savitris from the age of Mahabharata is to nurture a fallacy.

Gender discrimination apart, an unjust law promotes crime. India's law on adultery promotes entrapment, extortion and blackmail. The law provides an unscrupulous woman with a legal weapon to earn mountains of easy cash. All she has to do is to have a fling with a wealthy man, married or unmarried. After that she can confront him and demand that unless he pays her a hefty amount, she'd go to the police and send him to five years in jail for adultery. He'll pay because he's faced with ruin. Thanks to technology, his blackmailing female lover could have taped their erotic conversations in bed. She could have quietly photographed his naked form with her mobile which would have recorded the time of their encounter. She could make a note of his body marks. He's cooked unless he pays. She's protected. Successful extortions like this must be happening widely. This should be brought to a stop.