Illegal demands for dowry and cruelty against women are persistent evils in our country. Parliament has enacted legislation to curb these evils. Demanding dowry is punishable under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code [IPC] punishes a husband and his relatives that harass or torture the wife and coerce her or her relatives to satisfy unlawful demands for dowry.

A person was convicted for an offence under Section 498A. He challenged the conviction on the ground that the complainant was not his legally wedded wife, as he was already married, and, therefore, Section 498A had no application in his case. The question before the Supreme Court was about the meaning of the expression “husband”, in the absence of any statutory definition. 

A bench of the Supreme Court comprising of Justices Arijit Pasayat and A.K. Ganguly in a recent judgment held that irrespective of the legitimacy of the marriage, for the purposes of Section 498A the expression “husband” would include a person who enters into a marital relationship and under the colour of a proclaimed or feigned status of “husband” subjects the woman to cruelty to satisfy illegal dowry demands. The Court further held that “the absence of a definition of ‘husband’ to specifically include such persons who contract marriages ostensibly and cohabitate with such woman, in the purported exercise of his role and status as ‘husband’ is no ground to exclude such person from the purview of Section 498A.”

In common parlance a husband is a person who is legally wedded to another woman, and the marriage is subsisting. What is the basis for the court’s extraordinary conclusion?  One is that acts of Parliament are not “drafted with divine prescience and perfect clarity”. True, but can that justify the reasoning that when a defect appears a judge cannot “simply fold his hands and blame the draftsman. He must set to work on the constructive task of finding the intention of Parliament not only from the language of the statute, but also from a consideration of the social conditions which gave rise to the statute”? Then the judge “must supplement the written word so as to give ‘force and life’ to the intention of the legislature.” The eminent English judge, Lord Denning, who had adopted a similar approach, was roundly reproved by the House of Lords who decried “such judicial heroics.”

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