The Supreme Court discharged Santosh Kumar from rape and cheating charges. The ruling distinguished failed consensual relationships from cases involving coercion or fraudulent consent.Newdelhi,Oct 30, 2026 14:58 ISTThe Supreme Court has said that physical intimacy during a consensual relationship cannot later be treated as rape merely because the relationship ended or turned sour, news agency Press Trust of India reported.A bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and R Mahadevan made the observation while discharging Kerala resident Santosh Kumar N P from charges of rape and cheating.
The court said cases involving consent obtained through deliberate deception or fraud from the outset must be distinguished from those in which a person later regrets consensual acts after a relationship ends.“In such cases, physical intimacy that occurred during the currency of a functioning relationship cannot be retrospectively branded as an act of rape merely because the relationship soured and no longer subsists,” the bench said.The court said regret in hindsight cannot, on its own, turn a consensual relationship into a crime and set the criminal justice system in motion in a way that deprives the accused of his liberty and reputation. “Such an approach denudes the man of any agency entirely as the mere factor of being in a consensual relationship at one point would bind him to it entirely for fear of being accused of rape at a subsequent point of time,” the court said. “In such a scenario, can it be said that the man has no right to withdraw from the relationship? Can the decision be termed as deceit or fraud?
Clearly not.”The Supreme Court said it had repeatedly witnessed a disturbing trend in which failed relationships were converted into criminal cases. It cautioned that rape charges, involving a heinous offence, must be reserved for situations involving actual sexual violence, coercion or manipulation of consent. “When every consensual relationship which sours is converted into an accusation of rape, it dilutes the gravity of the offence alleged or rather negates the very allegation of crime,” the bench said.According to PTI, Kumar had approached the Supreme Court after the Kerala High Court dismissed his petitions seeking discharge and the quashing of proceedings against him.According to the prosecution, the woman alleged that Kumar concealed an earlier marriage, married her while that marriage was still valid and had sexual relations with her after fraudulently leading her to believe that their marriage was lawful.
She accused him of rape, cheating and breach of trust.The woman, who had been divorced from an earlier marriage, alleged that she and Kumar married in Mysore and lived together from 1996 to 2003.Discharging Kumar from the charges, the Supreme Court reiterated that the end of a consensual relationship cannot by itself turn earlier physical intimacy into rape, while distinguishing such cases from those involving deception, coercion or fraudulent consent from the beginning.- Ends