1. In this Criminal Miscellaneous Petition, the Petitioner is challenging the initiation of criminal proceedings in Bolangir Town PS Case No. 191 of 2021 (corresponding to OR Case No. 426 of 2021) registered in the Court of the learned SDJM, Bolangir. The charges include offenses under Sections 376(2)(a) , 376(2)(i) , 376(2)(n) , 294 , 506 , and 34 of the IPC.

Page 1 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR

Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 I. FACTS AS PRESENTED BY THE PETITIONER:

Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46

7. In the civil suit, she claimed that, on 03.02.2021, she and the Petitioner had solemnized their marriage at Samaleswari Temple, Sambalpur, and exchanged garlands, vermilion, and mangalsutra. She also alleged that they applied for marriage registration under the Special Marriage Act , but the Petitioner failed to appear for the registration on 18.03.2021.

8. After the FIR was registered, the prosecutrix's statement was recorded under Sections 161 and 164 of the Cr.P.C., and she was medically examined.

9. The Petitioner highlights that the prosecutrix's allegations in the FIR and the Civil Proceeding are inconsistent. In the FIR, she did not mention the marriage at Samaleswari Temple, but in the civil suit, she claimed to be the Petitioner's legally married wife. II. PETITIONER'S SUBMISSIONS:

10. The Petitioner contends that the relationship between him and the prosecutrix was consensual. The prosecutrix is a grown-up, mature, and intelligent woman who understood the consequences of her actions. She voluntarily maintained the relationship despite alleged objections from the Petitioner's family.

11. The Petitioner argues that the prosecutrix's claim of a false promise of marriage is baseless. The relationship was based on mutual consent, and the prosecutrix continued the relationship even after being allegedly tortured by the Petitioner's family.

12. The prosecutrix's allegations in the FIR and the Civil Proceeding are contradictory. In the FIR, she did not mention the marriage at Page 3 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 Samaleswari Temple, but in the civil suit, she claimed to be the Petitioner's legally married wife. This inconsistency raises doubts about her credibility.

13. The Petitioner submits that there is no evidence to substantiate the prosecutrix's claims regarding her alleged admission to Titilagarh Government Hospital following a suicide attempt. Additionally, there is no record of any complaint lodged by her at Titilagarh Police Station, as she asserts. Furthermore, no medical or documentary proof has been presented to support the allegation that the Petitioner administered "Unwanted 72" pills to the prosecutrix.

14. The Petitioner had previously approached this Court under Section 438 Cr.P.C. for anticipatory bail, which was disposed of on 29.06.2021. In its order, the Court prima facie observed that the prosecutrix was a consenting party to the relationship and that her primary grievance stemmed from the Petitioner's refusal to marry her, rather than any act of coercion. The Court further noted that the relationship between the parties was consensual and had continued for approximately nine years, thereby casting doubt on the allegations of rape under a false promise of marriage.

III. OPPOSITE PARTIES' SUBMISSION:

IV. COURT'S ANALYSIS AND REASONING:

However, in a civil case, she later stated that she was already married to him. This contradiction, along with the lack of evidence of coercion or deception at the start of the relationship, is central to the dispute. The key legal question is whether the Petitioner's failure to marry the prosecutrix invalidates her consent under Section 375 OF IPC or if this is simply a failed personal relationship that does not amount to a criminal offense.

19. At this juncture, the first and foremost consideration before this Court is whether it possesses the jurisdiction to quash the proceedings in question. This would necessitate a careful and purposive interpretation of Section 482 of the Cr.P.C.

20. It is a well-settled principle that Section 482 of the Cr.P.C. serves as an overriding provision, preserving the inherent powers of the Court to uphold the ends of justice. The jurisdiction conferred under this provision is of an extraordinary nature and must be exercised with utmost caution and circumspection. While the Court is vested with Page 5 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 wide discretion in determining whether to invoke such powers, it must be mindful that indiscriminate interference at the threshold of criminal proceedings may unduly pre-empt the prosecution from discharging its duty of conducting a fair investigation and presenting evidence.

21. To this effect, the Supreme Court in the case of Pramod Suryabhan Pawar v. The State of Maharashtra1 , observed as follows:-

22. In view of the diverse and multifaceted nature of cases that come before the High Courts, any rigid formulation of principles governing the exercise of extraordinary jurisdiction would serve only to fetter judicial discretion, rendering it impotent in the face of unforeseen injustices. Recognizing this necessity, the Supreme Court, in State of Haryana v. Bhajan Lal,2 undertook a comprehensive analysis of the circumstances under which the inherent powers of the judiciary may be justly invoked. The decision, far from prescribing an exhaustive 1 AIR 2019 SUPREME COURT 4010 2 1992 AIR 604.

Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR

Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 rule, set forth illustrative instances where the quashing of proceedings would be not only permissible but imperative to prevent an abuse of process. Among these, certain principles find direct relevance to the matter at hand and shall be duly considered in the course of this adjudication:-

23. The foregoing precedent leaves no room for doubt that in determining whether to invoke its jurisdiction under Section 482, the Court is not called upon to weigh the truth of the allegations or to engage in an evaluation of competing evidence. Confined to the four corners of the FIR, the inquiry is narrow: whether, on its face, the allegations disclose the commission of a cognizable offence? In this regard, the reasoning articulated in Dhruvaram Murlidhar Sonar v. State of Page 7 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 Maharashtra3 assumes particular significance, illuminating the precise contours within which this Court's extraordinary powers may be exercised. The relevant excerpts are produced below:

24. In the case before this court, the allegations leveled against the Petitioner are of grave import, implicating Sections 376(2)(a) , 376(2)(i) , 376(2)(n) , 294 , 506 , and 34 of the IPC, provisions that speak to offenses of sexual assault, criminal intimidation, and common intention. Section 376, in its various sub-clauses, prescribes the punishment for rape, as delineated under Section 375. It sets forth the essential ingredients constituting the offense. In the factual constellation before us, particular attention must be directed toward the second such description, taken in conjunction with Section 90, which governs the vitiation of consent. The relevant excerpts are produced below:

25. Upon careful perusal of the provisions outlined, the submissions made, and the case records, one incontrovertible truth emerges; the fulcrum upon which the adjudication of this case rests is "consent". In the jurisprudence of sexual offences, the absence or presence of consent is not merely a factual consideration but the very essence of criminal culpability. The law mandates that the prosecution must establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that consent was either absent or vitiated by coercion, deception, or incapacity. Thus, in the final analysis, the outcome of this case shall turn solely on this cardinal question: was there free, voluntary, and unequivocal consent?

26. The annals of jurisprudence are replete with deliberations on the concept of consent, a principle that has been scrutinized, refined, and expounded upon in countless judicial pronouncements. Within the Page 9 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 framework of Section 375 of the IPC, consent is not a mere nod of acquiescence, nor the absence of resistance, but an active and reasoned understanding of the circumstances, the nature of the act, and its attendant consequences. In Dhruvaram Sonar (supra), the Supreme Court observed "15. ... An inference as to consent can be drawn if only based on evidence or probabilities of the case. "Consent" is also stated to be an act of reason coupled with deliberation. It denotes an active will in mind of a person to permit the doing of the act complained of."

27. This provision was further substantiated and succinctly articulated in Pramod Suryabhan Pawar (supra) wherein the Supreme Court held as follows:

28. Indeed, this Court, drawing upon the wisdom of the aforementioned precedents, had an occasion to consider this very issue in G. Achyut Kumar v. State of Odisha.4 Therein , the concept of consent and the 4 2020 SCC OnLine Ori 417.

Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR

Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 agency of a woman in asserting it stood at the forefront of deliberation. The relevant excerpts are produced below:

29. Applying the weight of precedent to the facts at hand, one truth emerges with unmistakable clarity; the prosecutrix's consent was not vitiated by any misconception of fact. The law does not extend its protection to every broken promise nor does it impose criminality upon every failed relationship. The Petitioner and the prosecutrix entered into a relationship in 2012, when both were competent, Page 11 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 consenting adults, capable of making their own choices, of exercising their own will, and of shaping their own futures. That the relationship did not culminate in marriage may be a source of personal grievance, but the failure of love is not a crime, nor does the law transform disappointment into deception.

30. The most pressing issue that demands recognition is the urgent need to disentangle the constructs of sex and marriage, both in our legal system and in the social consciousness that shapes it. The concept of sexual autonomy, a woman's right to make independent and uncoerced decisions about her body, sexuality, and relationships, has been a site of continuous contestation within feminist philosophy.

31. Judith Butler, one of the most influential post-structuralist feminist thinkers, offers a critical interrogation of gender norms, performativity, and power structures, providing a radical framework for understanding sexual autonomy beyond the rigid binaries of sex, gender, and societal morality. In her work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,5 she has challenged the idea that gender and sexuality are innate or biologically determined. Instead, she argues that gender is a series of repeated acts, gestures, and behaviors that are culturally and socially constructed. This performative nature of gender extends to sexuality, which is also shaped by societal norms and power structures. One of Butler's key arguments is that heterosexual norms are artificially constructed and sustained through repetitive acts of gender performance:

32. Marriage, in a patriarchal society, has been reduced to a mere performative act, reinforcing the notion that female sexuality must be bound to male commitment. It is a legal construct, a deliberate compact between two individuals who elect to bind their futures together under the sanction of law. It is not the inexorable destination of passion, nor the predetermined consequence of intimacy. To conflate the two is to imprison human relationships within archaic expectations, to deny individuals, especially women, their right to autonomy, to choice, to the pursuit of desire unshackled by social decree.

33. Marriage is a choice, not inevitability. It is a legal recognition, not a moral recompense for physical union. It is an agreement, not atonement. To treat it otherwise is to strip individuals of their right to define their relationships on their own terms, to reduce love to a binding transaction, and to transform desire into a liability.

34. Feminist philosophy has long waged battle against the tyranny of expectation, the insidious notion that a woman's sexual agency is valid only when tethered to marriage. Simone de Beauvoir, a renowned French existentialist philosopher, feminist theorist, and writer, in her seminal work The Second Sex,6 unmasked the historical subjugation embedded in this expectation:

35. It is this fiction of destiny that the law must resist. The presumption that a woman engages in intimacy only as a prelude to marriage, that her consent to one act is but a silent pledge to another, is a vestige of patriarchal thought, not a principle of justice. The law cannot lend itself to such a perversion of choice, where failed relationships become grounds for legal redress, and disappointment is cloaked in the language of deception.

36. The legal system, by criminalizing sex under a "false promise of marriage," upholds this performative construct, one that assumes that women engage in sexual relationships only as a prelude to matrimony, rather than as autonomous agents of their own desires.

37. In its pursuit of justice, the law must not become an instrument of moral policing. It must acknowledge that sexual agency is not a promise, nor is it a contract that mandates a predetermined outcome. To assume otherwise is to deny women the full measure of their autonomy, desire, and choice, reducing them to mere bearers of honour, rather than as individuals possessing an intrinsic right to their own bodies and decisions.

38. Society, for far too long, has treated sex as a transaction, where the woman's participation is conditioned upon the promise of marriage, and her agency is recognized only in so far as it aligns with this Page 14 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 expectation. But the law must not succumb to such anachronistic notions. The ability of a woman to engage in intimacy on her own terms, free from coercion, from expectation, and from the weight of archaic social contracts, must be protected, not punished.

39. It is in this light that the automatic criminalization of failed relationships under the guise of "false promise of marriage" must be scrutinized. The assumption that every physical relationship between a man and a woman carries the implicit condition of matrimony is not a principle of law but a vestige of control. It is a proposition that denies women the very agency the law purports to protect.

40. The law must be a shield, not a shackle. It must recognize that sexual autonomy is a right, not a bargain, and that the exercise of this right is not a betrayal of virtue, not an invitation for legal persecution. If the law is to serve justice, it must evolve, not in deference to tradition, but in allegiance to the fundamental truth that a woman's body, her choices, and her future are hers alone to define.

41. Yet, the realities of society cannot be ignored, nor can the law afford to be blind to the conditions in which it operates. In the vast expanse of this nation, there exist women reared in conservatism, sheltered from the world, their choices shaped not by unfettered will but by the narrow confines of tradition. For them, consent may not always be an act of true volition, but rather a submission to circumstance, to pressure, to the unspoken weight of expectation.

42. Thus, this reasoning must not be wielded as a sword where it was meant to be a shield. It must not become a tool of exploitation, Page 15 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 allowing men to feign love, deceive the trusting, and abandon them to dishonor. The law must tread with vigilance and make sure that principle does not become pretext for abuse.

43. The intervention of the court in this particular case was imperative to shield the criminal justice system from being wielded as an instrument of vengeance for the collapse of a personal relationship. The pivotal question turned upon the consent of the prosecutrix and whether it had been tainted by fraud or coercion. The inconsistencies in her narrative where she charged the petitioner with rape on the pretext of a false promise of marriage in the FIR while in the civil proceeding she asserted that she was already his legally wedded wife cast a shadow upon the veracity of her allegations. The fact that the relationship lasted nearly nine years clearly showed that it was voluntary, making the invocation of Section 376 of the IPC questionable. Quashing the criminal proceedings is necessary to protect the integrity of the law and prevent it from being used to litigate personal disappointments or moral conflicts. The justice system is meant to address genuine crimes, not to serve as a battleground for failed relationships.

44. Accordingly, the holding in this case is confined to its own facts, and the judgment must not be read as a universal license. Each case must be weighed on its own merits, with the Court ever mindful that justice, to be just, must be both principled and compassionate. Page 16 of 17 Signature Not Verified Digitally Signed Signed by: BHABAGRAHI JHANKAR

Designation: AR-CUM- SR. SECRETARY Reason: Authentication Location: ORISSA HIGH COURT, CUTTACK Date: 21-Feb-2025 17:22:46 V. CONCLUSION:

45. In light of the legal precedents, the concept of consent, and the principles of sexual autonomy, this Court finds that continuation of criminal proceedings against the Petitioner would constitute an abuse of process. The allegations, even if taken at face value, do not disclose the commission of a cognizable offense. Therefore, invoking the extraordinary jurisdiction under Section 482 Cr.P.C., this Court deems it just and proper to quash the impugned proceedings.

46. Accordingly, this Criminal Miscellaneous Petition is allowed, and the impugned proceedings are hereby quashed.

(Dr. S.K. Panigrahi) Judge Orissa High Court, Cuttack, Dated the 14th February, 2025/ Page 17 of 17