Supreme Court judge Lavu Nageswara Rao said here on Sunday the institution of marriage had been sacred in all religions but the growing intolerance among the couples jeopardised it.

“Adjudicating such cases is a very tricky job and in the instances when I was forced to take up some of them, I ended up mediating between the husbands and wives rather than implement the law,” he observed.

Delivering a lecture in the memory of former Chief Justice of India P.N. Bhagwati and noted criminal lawyer C. Padmanabha Reddy on the topic ‘Criminal law and marriage’ organised by the Indian Association of Lawyers (IAL), Justice Nageswara Rao said the Law Commission was striving to find definitive ways to deal with marital discord, on which there were several landmark judgments that date back to the British era.

He said every fourth or fifth woman in India complained of domestic violence, harassment for dowry and other forms of deprivation of their rights.

The situation had come to such a pause that marital rape and conjugal rights were hotly contested by couples who were increasingly finding it difficult to adjust and they were going to the extent of claiming individual rights to privacy.

Justice Rao said keeping the sensitivity of the issues, various courts ruled that before filing the First Information Report (FIR), a preliminary inquiry should be done into an offence that attracted punishment under Sec. 498-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) to ensure that the complaints were not frivolous. When it comes to marital rape, an entire gamut of circumstances has to be examined before possibly invoking Sec. 376 of the IPC.

The apex court judge said the complexity of a marriage, marital rape etc., howsoever they were treated in different societies, was reflected in their diverse interpretations by esteemed judges like Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Keith and Jagdish Sharan Verma.

“Since reformation, not retribution, is the basic objective of any criminal law, our effort should be to unite the estranged couples in their own interest and of their progeny,” Justice Rao exhorted the Bar and the Bench.

A.P. and Telangana High Court judge C. Praveen Kumar and Supreme Court senior advocates R.S. Cheema and Jitendra Sharma were among those present.

As carried in TH ON 1/9/2017