IN 2014, A WOMAN in Uttar Pradesh filed a complaint alleging that a man had been raping her since 2010 on a false promise of marriage. It took eleven more years for the case to be thrown out. On 2 September 2025, in Pradeep Kumar Kesarwani v. State of Uttar Pradesh, a Supreme Court bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Sandeep Mehta found that the complaint had come four years after the alleged conduct, lacked essential particulars and had no independent evidence behind it. What the Court had in front of it was one person’s word against another’s, now being used to hold a criminal trial over someone’s head indefinitely. Letting it continue, the bench held, would be a gross abuse of the process of law.
Kesarwani was decided under the old Indian Penal Code; the conduct it concerned predated India’s new criminal code by more than a decade. But it has quietly become the most important reference point for a provision of that new code that almost nobody outside courtrooms has noticed: Section 69 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, in force since 1 July 2024. Section 69 did something Indian law had never done before. It made sexual intercourse obtained “by deceitful means”, or by a promise to marry made “without any intention of fulfilling the same”, a standalone crime, punishable with up to ten years in prison. The section is explicit that such intercourse does not amount to rape. Its “deceitful means” also cover false promises of employment or promotion, inducement, and marrying after suppressing one’s identity. But it is the promise of marriage that fills the courts.
BEFORE SECTION 69 EXISTED, this kind of case didn’t have its own law at all. Prosecutors reached for Section 375 of the old Indian Penal Code – rape – and stretched it, using Section 90’s rule that consent given under a “misconception of fact” isn’t really consent in the eyes of the law. Over roughly two decades, the Supreme Court built an entire body of doctrine around that one idea. In Uday v. State of Karnataka, the Court held that consent given out of love, on a promise of marriage later broken, was not necessarily consent obtained by misconception. Deepak Gulati v. State of Haryana drew a sharper line between a genuine promise that simply fell apart later and one that was a lie from the very beginning. By 2019, in Pramod Suryabhan Pawar v. State of Maharashtra, that reasoning had hardened into a clean two-part test: the promise had to be false and made in bad faith at the time, and it had to be the direct reason consent was given. A few years later, Naim Ahmed v. State (NCT of Delhi) added the obvious but important corollary – a relationship that simply fails isn’t a crime, even if a promise was part of it.
Section 69 took the conclusion of all that case law – that deception-based sex deserves its own criminal category – and wrote half of its reasoning into a statute. The words “without any intention of fulfilling the same” are Deepak Gulati’s line between a broken promise and a false one, now in black letter. What Parliament left out is the other half of the Pawar test. Nothing in the text requires that the false promise be the reason consent was given rather than something said along the way. And nothing in it addresses the problem courts had spent twenty years circling: that a person’s intention at the start of a relationship is nearly impossible to prove months or years later, when the only evidence is two conflicting accounts of what was said. The Standing Committee on Home Affairs, which examined the clause before it was passed, did not take that problem up. Its report on the clause noted a typographical error and recommended adding concealment of marital status to the list of deceitful means. The harder work of drawing the line fell to judges.
THEY HAVE NOT HAD TO START FROM SCRATCH. Because Section 69 cannot reach conduct before July 2024, and because cases take years to climb the courts, the false-promise disputes decided since the new code arrived have overwhelmingly been old IPC prosecutions. Those rulings don’t interpret Section 69. But they are the doctrine it will be read against, and 2025 was the year the Supreme Court restated that doctrine most insistently.
In January, in Nitin B. Nikhare v. State of Maharashtra, the Supreme Court allowed the accused’s appeal, repeating a theme that would recur all year: physical intimacy following a promise to marry does not automatically become rape just because the marriage never happened. The prosecution had to show that the promise was false from the start and that it directly induced consent. In April, in Jaspal Singh Kaural v. State (NCT of Delhi), the complainant said she had divorced her husband on the strength of the accused’s promise, which he then broke. The Sessions Court discharged him; the Delhi High Court ordered charges framed; the Supreme Court restored the discharge. Leaning on Naim Ahmed, it read the evidence – the accused had even paid for a mangalsutra bearing his initials – as a sign of a genuine promise that later fell through, not a lie from the outset. In April, Ravish Singh Rana v. State of Uttarakhand went further still, adding a rule specifically for live-in couples: where two adults lived together for a substantial length of time – in that case more than two years – courts should presume valid consent, rather than a relationship premised solely on marriage.
Each of these rulings, on its own, looks like a narrow correction to an individual case. Stacked together over a single year, they add up to something else: the judiciary restating, with unusual urgency, the safeguards Parliament only half wrote into the new text. Kesarwani is where that project took its most concrete form. Faced with a complaint that had rotted for years with nothing to support it, the Court didn’t just quash one case – it reached back to the four-part test it had laid down in Rajiv Thapar v. Madan Lal Kapoor in 2013 and pointed High Courts to it as the way to decide whether a false-promise prosecution should be thrown out before trial: Is the accused’s evidence genuinely reliable? Is it strong enough to seriously challenge what the complaint alleges? Can the prosecution’s case actually stand up against it? And, weighing everything together, would letting the trial grind on be fair at all?
It’s worth being precise about what that test is and isn’t. It’s a procedural filter – a set of questions about when a case should be allowed to continue, exercised under the High Courts’ inherent powers (now Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, successor to the old Section 482 of the CrPC). It doesn’t tell anyone what “deceitful means” actually means, or when a broken promise crosses the line into a crime.
The first answers to that question under Section 69 itself are only now arriving. In September, in Zahid Shanavas v. State of Kerala, the Kerala High Court, exercising its Section 528 powers, held that a later failure to marry cannot retrospectively turn consensual sex into a Section 69 offence. Justice Jobin Sebastian ruled that a promise of marriage, by itself, is not enough: there must be a factual foundation showing the promise was false from inception and that it directly induced consent. In other words, he read the missing half of the Pawar test into the statute. It is a sensible reading. It is also the reading of a single judge, deciding quashing petitions one at a time.
WHILE ALL OF THIS WAS UNFOLDING, something far more consequential was sitting almost unnoticed in that same High Court. In September 2024, barely two months after Section 69 came into force, an advocate filed a public interest petition – Vimal Vijay v. Union of India – challenging the section’s constitutionality outright, not just its application in any one case.
The petition’s core argument is uncomfortable in a way the case law never had to confront. Section 69 punishes deceit practised by “whoever” on “a woman” – and the petitioner argues that by presuming only a man can deceive with a promise of marriage, it fails the basic constitutional test of reasonable classification under Article 14. It goes further: the provision can’t be defended as a special measure for women under Article 15(3), the petition argues, because rather than empowering women it is built on the assumption that a woman cannot meaningfully consent to sex without the inducement of marriage. The petition also invokes the rights to expression, privacy and sexual autonomy under Articles 19(1)(a) and 21, and the privacy recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India; attacks the vagueness of the word “identity” in the section; and points out that the law’s total silence on live-in relationships and same-sex couples leaves it both too broad in some places and too narrow in others. The Kerala High Court issued notice to the Union government in September 2024. More than two years on, the petition is still pending.
SO HERE IS WHERE SECTION 69 STANDS: a law a little over two years old, being read through a Supreme Court doctrine developed entirely under the old code, and now through single-judge rulings that write that doctrine into the new text – while the far more basic question of whether the law can constitutionally exist has never been answered by any court. Judges at every level, from magistrates ordering discharge to the Supreme Court in Kesarwani to the Kerala High Court itself, have been practising a quiet form of constitutional avoidance: narrowing the offence’s practical reach through interpretation and procedure, while leaving the Article 14 and Article 21 objections untouched. The irony is that the same High Court sitting on the constitutional challenge has already begun applying the provision it has yet to rule on.
That approach has done real, tangible good – it has stopped some clearly bad-faith and stale prosecutions from dragging on for years, as Kesarwani itself shows. But it has also meant that what Section 69 actually means, in practice, depends less on the words Parliament wrote than on whichever investigating officer happens to record the First Information Report, and whether that FIR eventually reaches a court willing to apply the Pawar test. That is an unusual, and not especially stable, way for a ten-year-imprisonment offence to function.
Whatever the Kerala High Court eventually decides in Vimal Vijay, it is likely to matter more than every ruling on this law so far combined. If the Court reads the Pawar test’s safeguards into the statute as a constitutional requirement, it would give Section 69 the precision Parliament didn’t provide at the drafting stage – with more authority than any single quashing order. If it strikes the provision down, India loses the only standalone criminal offence built specifically around deceit in intimate relationships, and Parliament goes back to the drawing board. Until then, Section 69 remains something close to a legal anomaly: a criminal offence whose real content is still being worked out case by case, largely outside the text that brought it into existence – a reminder that writing judicial doctrine into a statute is only as sound as the precision of the words used to do it.
