Sex is not a subject that brings out the best in the Indian intellect. It dithers, ducks and evades. The law against adultery, for example, represents one form of this confusion. The formal definition of adultery gives primacy to the notion of a man in a sexual relationship with a married woman. Her husband can complain. Various cases have compelled some evolution in this respect, suggesting that even an unmarried woman in relationship with a married man would be participating in adultery. Here the wife could be the offended party, but the law does not give her the right to complain. If, as the Supreme Court has recently pointed out, the law against adultery is biased against the man in what is by definition a consensual relationship with a woman, the law is also biased in another way. The married woman in a relationship outside her marriage is seen as the property of her husband, since the law envisages the husband as the offended party. There is no conception of woman’s agency, which is in line with the tendency in Indian society and practices to deprive women of the right over their bodies.

The Supreme Court’s clarity could be used to reframe the law, with a changed and changing world in mind. For example, if a married man or woman has a same-sex relationship outside marriage, is that adultery? But the question law-makers should perhaps ask is more fundamental. Should adultery be a chargeable offence in itself? It is a logical ground for divorce, of course, for in that case, it is a matter for the couple in question to decide on. For a man to have the right to have a hold over his wife by punishing her lover — by imprisonment — seems fairly primeval. Women as well as men should be free to manage their own sexual and emotional lives, and decide for themselves whom they want to bed or how they discharge their responsibilities to themselves, their dependents and their partners. It is high time Indians tried to be less hypocritical about sex.