When a lawmaker stands in India’s Parliament and argues that criminalising marital rape will destroy the institution of marriage, he is not speaking in a vacuum. He is drawing on centuries of religious tradition, social custom, and political calculation, all wrapped tightly around one idea: that a Hindu wife’s body belongs to her husband. That idea has roots in ancient scripture. It also has opponents within the same tradition. And today, that tension is playing out in courtrooms, Parliament, and living rooms across a nation of 1.4 billion people.
The question is no longer merely legal. It is civilisational.
What Hindu Scripture Actually Says About Marital Consent
The debate over marital rape in India cannot be separated from its religious context. Hinduism is not a monolith, but its classical texts have historically painted a troubling picture of women’s autonomy within marriage.
The Dharma Shastras, the Vedas, and the Manu Smriti, foundational texts that shaped Hindu personal law for centuries, treat women as property of their husbands with no independent legal or bodily rights. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad goes further, stating explicitly that a wife who refuses her husband’s sexual demands deserves physical punishment. These are not fringe interpretations. They were mainstream doctrine for generations, and their echo is still audible in how courts, governments, and families approach the issue today.
The concept of Patni Dharma, the sacred duty of a virtuous wife, has long served as the social mechanism through which this doctrine operates. A wife who resists is not exercising consent. She is failing her dharma. This framing does not just excuse marital rape. It makes the very concept of marital rape inconceivable within a traditional Hindu worldview.
Yet the picture is more complicated than critics often acknowledge.
The Other Side of the Tradition
Progressive Hindu scholars and legal advocates argue that the patriarchal reading of scripture is selective and politically convenient. They point out that Hindu civilisation also produced Rishikas, women scholars who composed Vedic hymns, and female prophets whose intellectual and spiritual authority was recognised by the tradition itself. If women were capable of that, the argument goes, their bodily autonomy cannot be considered theologically irrelevant.
Others note that Hindu marriage has evolved considerably since the Manu Smriti. Today, Hindu marriage under the Hindu Marriage Act 1955 grants husbands and wives separate and independent legal identities. Divorce, inheritance rights, and property ownership, all historically denied to women, are now legally protected. The law has moved. The question is whether it has moved far enough.
The reformers’ position is clear: the deeper spirit of Hindu philosophy, which affirms human dignity and individual atman, is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that a woman loses her right to consent the moment she marries. The problem is not Hinduism itself, they argue. The problem is a patriarchal social order that has always used religion as a shield.
BJP: Faith, Power, and Political Calculation
Here is where theology meets politics, and where reform runs into its hardest wall.
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which has governed India since 2014, is the dominant expression of Hindu nationalist politics in the country. Its base is socially conservative, its ideology explicitly rooted in Hindu cultural values, and its electoral calculations are tied to a constituency that views any challenge to traditional marriage as an attack on Hindu identity itself.
The party’s position on marital rape has been consistent and unambiguous. A senior BJP MP argued in the Rajya Sabha that criminalising marital rape would end the institution of marriage. When pressed further, the Women and Child Development Minister deflected by calling the matter sub-judice, while simultaneously warning against condemning every Indian husband as a rapist.
When Prime Minister Modi’s government overhauled the entire Indian penal code in 2024, replacing the 164-year-old Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, marital rape immunity was carried forward intact as Exception 2 of Section 63. This was not an accidental omission. It was a deliberate political choice. The government has formally told the Supreme Court that criminalising marital rape would be “excessively harsh,” a formulation that legal scholars and women’s rights advocates found staggering in its implications.
The political logic is straightforward, if uncomfortable. Any party that moves against this exception risks being labelled anti-Hindu and anti-family by its opponents. In India’s current political climate, that is an electoral liability few parties are willing to absorb.
Where Reformers Can Still Win
Despite the legislative wall, the reform movement has not run out of options.
The Supreme Court remains the most credible avenue. By October 2024, a three-judge bench began hearing a batch of constitutional petitions challenging the marital rape exception. The hearings were deferred after the Chief Justice’s retirement, and the matter now sits before a new bench. The constitutional argument is strong: Exception 2 arguably violates Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantee equality, non-discrimination, and the right to life and dignity. India’s judiciary has moved before when the legislature refused to, most notably in the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that decriminalised homosexuality over parliamentary inaction.
In Parliament itself, opposition MP Shashi Tharoor introduced a Criminal Law Amendment Bill in December 2025, specifically targeting Exception 2. The bill has little chance of passing under BJP’s majority, but it keeps the debate visible and chips away at the political consensus that reform is unthinkable.
Civil society organisations, particularly the All India Democratic Women’s Association, one of the active petitioners before the Supreme Court, continue to build public pressure. Their argument is simple and irrefutable: consent is consent. It does not change its nature because a marriage certificate exists.
And then there is culture. Television series like Chiraiya, currently streaming on Hotstar, are bringing this conversation into living rooms where it was previously unspeakable. Cultural normalisation of a debate is often the quiet precursor to legal change. It was true of divorce. It was true of widow remarriage. It may yet prove true here.
A Nation Divided Against Itself
The data tells its own story. According to India’s National Family Health Survey, between 2019 and 2021, over 80 percent of married women who reported sexual violence identified their husband as the perpetrator. An estimated 31,516 rapes were reported across India in 2024 alone, yet marital rape is not counted among them, because the law does not recognise it as rape.
A crime that affects hundreds of millions of women is invisible in national statistics. That invisibility is not accidental. It is engineered by law, by tradition, and by political will.
The struggle over marital rape in India is ultimately a struggle over what kind of nation India intends to be. A country that treats its founding constitutional values as living commitments, or one that allows ancient patriarchy to masquerade as sacred tradition.
Hindu scripture is genuinely divided on this question. India’s constitution is not.
This post is part of an ongoing series on law, society, and human rights. AI assistance was used in research and drafting; editorial judgement and framing are the author’s own.
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