Keep Off Bedrooms: People live, love, marry, divorce, make choices. Decriminalising adultery is the necessary choice 

Government’s opposition to decriminalising adultery because this could “destroy the institution of marriage and destroy the fabric of society” is part of a larger reluctance to relinquish powers to police individual choices. The alarmist tenor of the Union’s warning was clearly intended to dissuade Supreme Court from focussing solely on constitutionality, which would warrant testing the Indian Penal Code provision outlawing adultery against the right to privacy, personal liberty and equality. But the court must see through this ploy and give primacy to individual rights.

Modern nations allow individuals to frame and live by their own codes of personal morality. Marriage laws should not allow the nanny state to hinder consenting adults. The marriage’s fate should rest entirely on the two people in it. Personal choices like adultery may be morally unacceptable for many individuals but should not amount to criminal offences. Yet, not only does Section 497 IPC entail peeking into bedrooms to catch marital infidelity, it adds insult to injury by punishing merely the cheating man but sparing him if the lover’s husband doesn’t object.

The husband’s rights over the wife and her lack of agency to resist a man’s charms are the ideas underlying this outdated Victorian law. It is at odds with the modern Indian state’s recognition of men and women as equals in life and marriage. Mai baap sarkar believes, wrongly, that legislating and policing every aspect of a citizen’s life keeps them safe and ensures order in society. But respecting the privacy and choices of citizens does not amount to destabilising society at all. It merely recognises that everything deemed ethical cannot be legislated and enforced through coercive governmental power; that approach destroys privacy and reduces citizens to an infantile state, without doing anything to guarantee ethics. It’s time to give up mai baap sarkar, it never works.