Case Analysis by Akinchan Aggarwal, Advocate — B.A. (Hons.), LL.B. (Gold Medalist), LL.M. (Disputes Resolution), UGC-NET, Ph.D. (Pursuing)
In a judgment that will reshape how Indian criminal law understands the modern family, the Supreme Court has held that Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code — the provision that punishes a husband and his relatives for cruelty — applies not only to legally wedded couples, but also to women in a “live-in relationship in the nature of marriage.” The decision, in Dr. Lokesh B.H. & Ors. v. State of Karnataka & Anr., 2026 INSC 784, was delivered on 3 August 2026 by a Bench of Justice Sanjay Karol and Justice Nongmeikapam Kotiswar Singh, with Justice Karol authoring the opinion.
For the first time, the word “husband” in a penal statute has been read to include a live-in partner. Yet the Court did not throw the doors open indiscriminately. It carefully fenced the ruling with a crucial requirement — an “intent to marry” — and reinforced the safeguards against the notorious misuse of Section 498A. This article examines the facts, the rival arguments, the Court’s reasoning across statutory interpretation and constitutional law, and what the ruling means in practice.
The Facts: A Marriage Disputed, A Prosecution Resisted
The appellant, Dr. Lokesh B.H., and respondent no. 2 (Smt. Theertha) were, according to her, married as per Hindu customs and rituals on 17 October 2010, after which they resided together in Bengaluru. By 2016, the marriage had hit rocky waters. Two complaints followed. The first (Crime No. 383 of 2016) resulted in a charge-sheet under Section 498A IPC before the JMFC, Shivamogga. The second (Crime No. 450 of 2016) produced a charge-sheet under Sections 498A, 504, 506, 307, 494 and 149 IPC, together with Sections 3 and 4 of the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, before the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Bengaluru.
The dispute turned on a single, fundamental fact: were the parties ever really married? The husband contended that there was no valid marriage at all — and therefore, he argued, no question of applying Section 498A could arise, since that provision speaks only of a “husband.” The wife maintained that there was a valid, subsisting marriage. The prosecution’s case included the allegation that the appellant had suppressed the factum of his first marriage, presented himself as respondent no. 2’s husband, harassed her for dowry, and caused her physical injury, including burns to her leg.
The appellant moved the Karnataka High Court under Section 482 CrPC to quash the proceedings. The High Court refused. In a significant passage, it held that the term “husband” in Section 498A must receive a “purposive and expansive construction,” and that a man who induces a woman to believe she is lawfully married to him and then subjects her to cruelty cannot escape liability “on the plea that no valid marriage existed in law.” The High Court went further, holding that “husband” extends not only to void or voidable marriages but also to a live-in relationship which bears the attributes of marriage, so long as the ingredients of cruelty are satisfied. It was this reasoning that the appellant carried to the Supreme Court.
The Rival Arguments
The case attracted an unusually rich array of participants, including two Additional Solicitors General and two amici curiae, reflecting the importance of the question.
For the appellant, senior counsel argued the orthodox position: Section 498A is a penal provision and must be construed strictly. “Husband” means a man in a valid and lawful marriage — not a void one. Crucially, counsel argued that a narrow reading does not leave the woman remedy-less, because other provisions of the IPC and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (DV Act) would still apply. Reliance was placed on Shivcharan Lal Verma v. State of M.P., where a Section 498A conviction was set aside because the marriage was null and void, and on U. Suvetha v. State, which listed “the woman must be married” as an ingredient of the offence.
The Union of India supported the appellant. It submitted that the parliamentary debates on the DV Act recorded that all prior remedies, including Section 498A, catered specifically to married women. Living together, however long, does not constitute marriage under the statutory regime, and if the law is inadequate, only Parliament can cure it — not the courts.
For respondent no. 2, and the amicus Ms. Nariman, the argument was that “husband” must be read purposively. To allow a wrongdoer who feigns marriage to escape merely because the marriage was invalid would be to permit him to take advantage of his own wrong. Reliance was placed on Reema Aggarwal v. Anupam and A. Subash Babu v. State of A.P. The amicus mounted a constitutional argument as well, invoking Articles 14, 15(3) and 21, the privacy jurisprudence of K.S. Puttaswamy, and Hiral P. Harsora, where a gendered restriction in the DV Act was struck down for lacking a rational nexus with the Act’s object. The State of Karnataka also supported dismissal of the appeal.
The Central Question
The issue, as the Court framed it, was narrow but consequential: can Section 498A IPC be construed so as to include a man in a “live-in relationship”? The word in the statute is plainly “husband.” The appellant and the Union wanted it read strictly; the respondent and the amicus wanted it read purposively. The judgment therefore became, in large part, a meditation on two competing canons of statutory interpretation — strict construction of penal statutes versus the purposive or mischief rule.
Strict Construction — But Not Blind Literalism
The Court began by acknowledging the settled principle that penal statutes are construed strictly. It surveyed a line of authority — the Constitution Bench in Commr. of Customs v. Dilip Kumar & Co., Standard Chartered Bank v. Directorate of Enforcement, and Chief Justice Marshall’s classic statement in United States v. Wiltberger — all confirming that a person charged is entitled to the benefit of any genuine ambiguity in the words defining an offence.
But the Court drew a vital distinction. Strict interpretation is not the same as blind literalism. As Dilip Kumar itself observed, “strict interpretation” does not encompass a literalism that leads to absurdity and defeats legislative intent. Quoting Justice Marshall, the Court noted that penal laws “are not to be construed so strictly as to defeat the obvious intention of the legislature.” Justice Dharmadhikari’s observation in Standard Chartered Bank was pressed into service: the rule of strict construction “does not warrant a narrow and pedantic construction… so as to leave loopholes for the offender to escape,” and a penal statute must also be construed to “suppress mischief and advance a remedy” in the light of Heydon’s case. The true task, the Court held, is to find “what is the true construction of the statute.”
The Mischief Rule and Purposive Interpretation
The Court then turned to the purposive or mischief rule, tracing it from Heydon’s case (1584) through Bengal Immunity, R.M.D. Chamarbaugwalla, Lord Denning’s celebrated dictum in Seaford Court Estates v. Asher (“a judge… can and should iron out the creases”), and the seven-judge Bench in Abhiram Singh v. C.D. Commachen. The thread running through these authorities is that in a welfare State, what is intended for the benefit of the people is often not fully reflected in the bare text, and the law must be interpreted “purposefully and realistically so that the benefit reaches the masses.” As the Court put it, quoting RBI v. Peerless, “if the text is the texture, context is what gives the colour.”
The judgment captured the modern consensus in a memorable line borrowed from Lord Millett: “we are all purposive constructionists now.”
The Object of Section 498A
Having set out the interpretive tools, the Court examined the genesis and purpose of Section 498A. The provision was inserted by the Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Act, 1983, in response to the rising tide of dowry deaths and “cases of cruelty to married women by their in-laws.” Its object, the Court emphasised, was reformative — cloaked with punishment: to introduce a factor of deterrence against reprehensible domestic conduct that the existing law did not adequately address.
The pivotal precedent here was Reema Aggarwal v. Anupam, where the Supreme Court had earlier asked precisely the question now before it: can a man hide behind “the smokescreen” of an invalid marriage while meting out cruelty? Reema Aggarwal answered that the expression “husband” must be construed to cover a person who enters into a marital relationship and, “under the colour of such proclaimed or feigned status of husband,” subjects the woman to cruelty — “whatever be the legitimacy of the marriage itself” for the limited purpose of Sections 498A and 304B. Importantly, the Court noted that Reema Aggarwal had been affirmed by a three-judge Bench in Rajinder Singh v. State of Punjab, giving it greater precedential weight than the contrary decisions relied on by the appellant. The Court found that Shivcharan Lal Verma turned on its own facts (it primarily concerned Section 306) and did not lay down binding precedent to the contrary.
Rejecting the appellant’s contention that “husband” is confined to a man married in the traditional sense, the Court held that the larger objective — “securing equality for women, stepping away from the superiority of males that is an inheritance from bygone days” — must inform the provision’s interpretation. Strict construction, it said, “cannot dim the objective of one part of the statute.” And in a telling logical extension, the Court observed that if “husband” is read to include a live-in partner, then the word “relative” in the section must correspondingly be read to include the “relative of a live-in partner.”
A Balanced Reckoning with Misuse
What distinguishes this judgment from a one-sided expansion of criminal liability is the Court’s candid engagement with the well-documented misuse of Section 498A. In a detailed, chronological table, the Bench traced the judicial understanding of “cruelty,” the object of the section, the meaning of “relative,” and a sobering line of authority on misuse — from Preeti Gupta and Arnesh Kumar (which cited National Crime Records Bureau data showing nearly two lakh arrests in a single year, a charge-sheeting rate of 93.6% but a conviction rate of only 15%) to recent decisions such as Rinku Baheti, Dara Lakshmi Narayana, Achin Gupta and Rajesh Chaddha, all cautioning against the mechanical implication of aged parents, distant relatives and married sisters living separately.
This acknowledgment matters. The Court did not pretend that widening the section is cost-free. Instead, it expanded coverage and tightened safeguards — a deliberate balancing exercise rather than a blunt instrument.
Live-In Relationships and “Relationship in the Nature of Marriage”
The Court then clarified a distinction that lies at the heart of the ruling. Drawing on dictionary definitions and the DV Act’s Section 2(f), which speaks of a “relationship in the nature of marriage,” the Bench explained that “live-in relationship” is a wider category, and “relationship in the nature of marriage” is a subset within it.
The leading authorities are D. Velusamy v. D. Patchaiammal and Indra Sarma v. V.K.V. Sarma. In Velusamy, the Court likened a “relationship in the nature of marriage” to a common-law marriage, requiring that the couple hold themselves out to society as spouses, be of legal age, be otherwise qualified to marry (including being unmarried), and have voluntarily cohabited in a shared household for a significant period. A mere “keep” maintained for sexual purposes, or a one-night stand, would not qualify. Indra Sarma supplied eight illustrative (non-exhaustive) guidelines — duration, shared household, pooling of resources, domestic arrangements, sexual relationship, children, socialisation in public, and the intention and conduct of the parties. The Court made clear that when it uses the term “live-in relationship” in this judgment, it means a “relationship in the nature of marriage.”
Why the DV Act Is Not Enough
A central plank of the appellant’s and the Union’s case was that women in such relationships are already protected by the DV Act, so there is no need to stretch Section 498A. The Court examined this argument seriously — and rejected it.
After surveying the DV Act’s comprehensive definition of domestic violence (Section 3) and its architecture of reliefs (residence orders under Section 17, monetary relief under Section 20, custody under Section 21, compensation under Section 22), the Court underscored a fundamental point: the DV Act is essentially a piece of civil legislation. As held in Kunapareddy and Prabha Tyagi, its orders are civil in nature; only Section 31, which penalises breach of a protection order (with imprisonment up to one year), carries a criminal edge. To say the DV Act therefore provides adequate protection to women in relationships in the nature of marriage, the Court held, “would be a misstatement of law.” The import of civil and criminal law is different, and so is the impact on the individual: “One has almost singularly civil and monetary consequences, whereas the other is backed by the force of criminal deterrence.” The submission was rejected.
The Constitutional Turn: Does Protection Depend on a Choice?
Here the judgment moves from statutory interpretation to constitutional principle — and this is its most powerful section. The Court posed a striking illustration involving a woman ‘A’ and a man ‘B’.
In the first scenario, A and B marry with their parents’ blessings; B’s family torments A with taunts, deprivation and even physical altercations. A registers an FIR; Section 498A applies; the family can be tried and convicted. In the second scenario, everything is identical — the same cohabitation, the same cruelty — except that A and B chose to live together before marrying. In the third scenario, B himself is cruel to A, again in an unmarried live-in setting. In all three, the Court observed, “A and B chose each other and decided to live life together.” The only difference is the presence or absence of a ceremony. Why should the protection differ?
Anchoring itself in K.S. Puttaswamy (privacy, dignity and decisional autonomy) and Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M. (the right to choose one’s partner as an intrinsic facet of liberty), the Court held that choosing to live in a relationship in the nature of marriage engages both spatial privacy (the sanctity of intimate relations and family life) and associational privacy (the freedom to choose whom one interacts with).
The Court then applied the classic Article 14 test of reasonable classification. Surveying Anwar Ali Sarkar, Triloki Nath Khosa and Justice Indu Malhotra’s opinion in Joseph Shine v. Union of India (which struck down the adultery offence under Section 497), the Court asked whether the distinction between a “married woman” and a “woman in a relationship in the nature of marriage” rests on an intelligible differentia having a rational nexus with the object of Section 498A. Its answer was no. The two categories are “strikingly similar”; the only difference is that one couple performed a ritual or went before a court, and the other did not. Since the object of Section 498A is to prevent cruelty in a household setting, whether or not the woman is married “does not have a proximate link to the objective of the Section.” The Court concluded that this distinction “has no rational nexus with the object of preventing domestic violence and is as such offensive to Article 14 of the Constitution of India.” As it observed with quiet force: “Cruelty, any which way, does not check at the door, whether the house it enters is that of a married woman or not.”
Law as a Living Organism
Harmonising the words of the section with its beneficial intent, the Court applied the four factors of Heydon’s case and reflected at length on the evolving character of law. It invoked Oliver Wendell Holmes’ image of law “adopting new principles from life at one end” and “sloughing off” old ones at the other, Justice H.R. Khanna in Maganlal Chhaganlal, Chief Justice Pathak in Union of India v. Raghubir Singh, and the transformative jurisprudence of Navtej Singh Johar (decriminalising same-sex relations) and S. Khushboo (recognising that live-in relationships between consenting adults are not an offence).
The Court recognised that live-in relationships are “today, more or less, a reality — primarily in urban areas,” driven in part by the growing financial independence of women, as noted in Ravish Singh Rana. In earlier days, it observed, marriage was seen as the only legitimate way for two people to build a life together; that is a changing phenomenon. Because law “must adapt itself to serve those who choose this form,” the protection given to a married woman should extend to a woman in a domestic setup even prior to marriage.
The Holding — and Its Crucial Limit
The Court’s core holding is stated in paragraph 20: a woman in a “relationship in the nature of marriage” shall be protected under Section 498A, giving the word “husband” a purposive interpretation, keeping in view the reformative, corrective and socially beneficial intent of the Section.
But the judgment’s most practically significant contribution is the limiting condition it attaches. Not every relationship in the nature of marriage will attract Section 498A. The Court drew a subtle but important line: “while not all live-in relationships are ‘relationships in the nature of marriage’, all ‘relationships in the nature of marriage’ also do not ‘mimic marriage’.” Where the parties clearly never intended to take the relationship into matrimony, there is no reason to equate it with marriage for the purposes of a penal provision. Accordingly, only those relationships in the nature of marriage that carry the requisite “intent to marry” — the ones closest to marriage itself — are entitled to the protection of Section 498A.
Because criminal liability is at stake, the Court held that a higher standard of proof applies, and that the initial burden of proving the intent to marry lies on the female live-in partner seeking the protection of the law. This is a meaningful safeguard against the wholesale importation of criminal liability into every cohabiting relationship.
Safeguards Against Misuse
Alive to the misuse it had earlier chronicled, the Court directed that the safeguards laid down in Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar — the well-known directions requiring police to comply with Section 41 and 41-A CrPC before arresting, and magistrates to apply their mind before authorising detention — shall be strictly applied in these cases. It stressed that no person accused of cruelty in a relationship in the nature of marriage, whether the partner or his relative, shall be arrested without preliminary enquiries.
The Conclusion of the Court
The Court’s formal conclusions may be summarised as follows:
(i) Section 498A applies to live-in relationships that qualify as relationships in the nature of marriage, with an intent to marry established as an intrinsic part thereof; (ii) such protected relationships are those between two consenting adults; (iii) the proposition of law is limited to Section 498A IPC only and does not affect any other provision; and (iv) the Arnesh Kumar safeguards against arrest shall be strictly applied, with no arrest without preliminary enquiry.
On the facts of the case itself, the Court declined to quash the proceedings against Dr. Lokesh B.H. Applying the tests in State of Haryana v. Bhajan Lal, it held that the allegations — suppression of a prior marriage, dowry harassment, and physical injury including burns — if taken at face value, prima facie disclose a cognizable offence. Whether they are true is a matter for trial. The trial court was left free to proceed in accordance with law, and the Court clarified that its observations on the facts were confined to the quashing question and were not a comment on the merits.
Analysis: A Significant, Carefully Calibrated Ruling
This judgment is important for at least three reasons.
First, it recalibrates the relationship between strict construction and purposive interpretation in penal law. The Court did not abandon the principle that penal statutes are strictly construed. Rather, it clarified that strict construction cannot be weaponised into a “narrow and pedantic” literalism that lets an offender escape by exploiting a technicality — here, the absence of a valid marriage certificate. This is consistent with, and builds upon, the earlier reasoning in Reema Aggarwal and its affirmation in Rajinder Singh.
Second, the constitutional reasoning is the true engine of the decision. By locating the question within Article 14’s guarantee of equality and Article 21’s protection of dignity, autonomy and privacy, the Court elevated the issue from a dry debate about the meaning of “husband” to a principled question about whether the State may extend or withhold protection against cruelty based solely on whether a couple performed a ceremony. Framed that way, the discrimination becomes difficult to defend.
Third, and most practically, the “intent to marry” requirement is a genuine limiting principle. It prevents the ruling from converting every cohabitation dispute into a Section 498A prosecution. Coupled with the higher standard of proof, the burden on the woman to establish that intent, and the strict application of the Arnesh Kumar arrest safeguards, the Court has attempted to expand protection for genuinely vulnerable women while guarding against the extortionate misuse it openly acknowledged.
There will, of course, be difficulties in application. Proving an “intent to marry” that fell short of actual marriage will be evidentially delicate, and much will turn on how trial courts assess conduct, correspondence and the surrounding circumstances. The confinement of the ruling to Section 498A — expressly not extending it to other provisions — also leaves open questions about how consistently the “relationship in the nature of marriage” concept will travel across the statute book. But as a matter of principle, the Court’s central intuition is hard to resist: cruelty inflicted within a shared household is no less real, and no less deserving of the criminal law’s deterrence, because the couple never solemnised their union.
Practical Implications: What Changes on the Ground
For litigants, investigating officers and trial courts, this ruling has immediate consequences. A woman who was in a live-in relationship in the nature of marriage — and who can point to an intent that the relationship would culminate in marriage — may now lodge a complaint under Section 498A against her partner and, where warranted, his relatives. This is a remedy that simply did not exist for her in the criminal law before, and it carries the deterrent force of a cognizable, non-bailable offence punishable with imprisonment of up to three years.
At the same time, the ruling does not hand out an automatic entitlement. A complainant will have to establish the foundational facts twice over: first, that the relationship satisfied the Indra Sarma and Velusamy indicators of a relationship in the nature of marriage — shared household, pooling of resources, domestic arrangements, holding themselves out to society as spouses, and the like; and second, the additional element of an intent to marry. Because the burden of proving that intent rests initially on the woman, and because a higher standard of proof applies in the criminal setting, the evidentiary threshold is deliberately more demanding than under the civil DV Act. Casual cohabitation, a “keep” arrangement, or a relationship that both parties always understood would never lead to marriage will fall outside the section’s reach.
For the defence, the judgment preserves — indeed reinforces — powerful protections. The Arnesh Kumar directions must be strictly followed: no automatic arrest merely because the offence is cognizable and non-bailable, mandatory recourse to the Section 41 and 41-A CrPC checklist, and preliminary enquiry before any arrest. Aged parents, distant relatives and married sisters living separately cannot be swept in mechanically, a concern the Court repeatedly flagged through Preeti Gupta, Rinku Baheti, Dara Lakshmi Narayana and Rajesh Chaddha. In effect, the gateway to prosecution is wider, but the corridor beyond it is tightly policed.
For the wider development of matrimonial and family law, the decision signals that the courts will increasingly treat the substance of a domestic relationship — the lived reality of cohabitation, dependence and vulnerability — as more legally salient than its formal label. The confinement of the ruling to Section 498A means the change is incremental rather than sweeping, but the reasoning it deploys, rooted in Article 14 equality and Article 21 dignity, is likely to influence how other beneficial and protective provisions are read in the years ahead.
Conclusion
In Dr. Lokesh B.H. v. State of Karnataka, the Supreme Court has brought the criminal law of cruelty into step with a social reality it can no longer ignore. By reading “husband” in Section 498A to include a live-in partner in a relationship in the nature of marriage — provided there is an intent to marry — the Court has extended a meaningful shield to women who, until now, fell through the gap between the civil DV Act and the criminal law. Equally, by insisting on that intent, a heightened standard of proof, and strict adherence to the Arnesh Kumar safeguards, it has sought to ensure that the shield does not become, in its own words, a “weapon rather than a shield.” It is a judgment that expands protection and restrains misuse in the same breath — and in that balance lies its quiet strength.
Case: Dr. Lokesh B.H. & Ors. v. State of Karnataka & Anr., 2026 INSC 784 (arising out of SLP (Crl.) Nos. 2240-2241 of 2026). Bench: Justice Sanjay Karol and Justice Nongmeikapam Kotiswar Singh. Date of Judgment: 3 August 2026.
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