While enrolled in a computer course in the Sambalpur district in 2012, the two began dating. In 2021, the lady filed a complaint against the sub-divisional judicial magistrate in the Bolangir district, charging the police officer of rape based on a fraudulent marriage promise. She said that to keep her from getting pregnant, he had given her emergency contraception.
She went to a Sambalpur family court in 2023 to get a ruling that she was the sub-inspector's lawfully wed wife and an order prohibiting him from getting married to anybody else. The lady further stated that the guy did not show up for their march 2021 court appearance, even though they registered their marriage under the Special marriage Act and were married in a ceremony at Samaleswari temple in Sambalpur.
"Every broken promise is not protected by the law, and every failed relationship is not criminalized. The court stated that when the man and woman started dating in 2012, they were both competent, consenting adults who could make their own decisions, exercise their own free will, and direct their own lives.
According to the High court, there is a pressing need to separate the concepts of marriage and sex in our legal system as well as in the social awareness that influences it.
Within feminist philosophy, there has been constant debate about the idea of sexual autonomy—a woman's freedom to make choices about her body, sexuality, and relationships on her own, free from coercion. The idea that female libido must be constrained by male commitment has been strengthened by the reduction of marriage to a purely performance act. It is a legal construct, a purposeful agreement between two people who want to legally link their destinies together. It is neither the inevitable outcome of closeness nor the inevitable end of desire. Justice Panigrahi stated that to confuse the two is to confine human interactions to antiquated norms and to deny people—women in particular—their freedom of choice, autonomy, and the ability to follow their desires without interference from traditional norms.
The judge went on: "The pernicious idea that a woman's sexual autonomy is only legitimate when linked to marriage is known as the tyranny of expectation, and feminist theory has long fought against it. In her groundbreaking book The Second sex, French existentialist philosopher, feminist theorist, and author Simone de Beauvoir exposed the historical oppression that underlies this assumption. The law must fight against this myth of fate.
A relic of patriarchal thinking rather than a reasonable concept is the assumption that a woman only has sexual relations as a preparation to marriage and that her agreement to one act is only a quiet commitment to another. Such a perversion of choice, where broken relationships are used as justifications for legal action and disappointment is covered up with deceptive rhetoric, is not something that the law can tolerate.
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