Supreme Court of India in New Delhi. File
| Photo Credit: S. Subramanium
The Supreme Court on Monday (August 3, 2026) said the criminal offence of domestic cruelty would extend to live-in relationships between consenting adults that qualify as “relationships in the nature of marriage”.
The judgment authored by a Bench headed by Justice Sanjay Karol said Section 498A (domestic cruelty) of the Indian Penal Code, now replaced by Sections 85 and 86 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, should not be limited to married relationships alone. Live-in relationships were a reality in modern, urban life. The law must adapt.
“If a woman is in a domestic setup even prior to marriage, which obviously, to a certain extent in the urban areas, is a reality today, the protection given to a married woman should be given to them also. Cruelty, any way, does not check at the door, whether the house it enters is that of a married woman or not,” Justice Karol observed.
The court reasoned that relationships in the nature of marriage and which show the requisite intent to marry were the “closest to marriage itself”.
“It is those relationships that shall be entitled to the protection of Section 498A,” the court said.
The court said the marital status of a woman, in the present day, did not have a proximate link to the objective of Section 498A, which was to prevent cruelty in a household setting.
“Living together, prior to marriage, is not unheard of or unacceptable anymore. In the same way, that same-sex relations, once criminalised and deemed to be a mental illness, have now been decriminalised and recognised as naturally occurring,” the court said.
The judgment came while dealing with a question whether a man who is in a live-in relationship can be prosecuted under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860.
Published – August 03, 2026 10:34 pm IST
