New Delhi: The Supreme Court last week upheld the conviction of a man for criminal intimidation after he threatened to upload a woman’s private bathing video on Facebook, saying the behaviour comes within the scope of “imputing unchastity to a woman” under Section 506 of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code (IPC).
A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Nongmeikapam Kotiswar Singh held on 22 May that “chastity is not to be seen from the narrow perspective of sexual behaviour cloistered by traditional moral values only, but also from the vantage point of dignity and autonomy associated with the sexual autonomy of a woman”.
The judgment does more than uphold the conviction of a man under Section 506, which relates to criminal intimidation and prescribes a punishment of seven years’ imprisonment or a fine or both for those found guilty.
It also redefines the legal concept of “unchastity” through a constitutional lens and upholds a woman’s fundamental right to sexual privacy, dignity, and autonomy in the digital age.
The case arose from a consensual relationship that later broke down. According to the judgment, the man had secretly recorded a video of the woman bathing and threatened to upload it to social media when pressed to honour a marriage commitment
Moreover, the judgment addresses a legal vacuum in cases involving allegations potentially falling under Section 506 of the IPC, or Section 351 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), particularly in consensual intimate relationships where, under the cover of privacy, offences are rarely proven.
The court applied the principle of “especial knowledge”, holding that where information is exclusively within the knowledge of a person, the burden of proving that fact lies upon that person.
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Chastity-based laws
The ruling is significant for its interpretation of the historical meaning of the word “chastity”.
The term chastity, from the Latin castus, meaning pure, entered the English language in the Middle Ages. It usually encompasses the moral practices relating to sexual purity.
Traditionally, laws concerning chastity focused on enforcing religious and cultural norms as they stood in the Victorian era.
In the Indian context, chastity-related laws are viewed as colonial imports aiming to protect female ‘virtue’. The word “unchastity” first appeared in the Penal Code in 1860, at a time when a woman’s value was inseparable from her sexual virtue.
When the IPC was drafted, a woman’s virtue could affect her social standing, her legal rights and the way courts assessed injury to her reputation. Chastity was not viewed as something belonging to the woman as an autonomous individual, but a value to be guarded because its perceived loss carried consequences for the family and community around her.
This logic ran through criminal law as well. Section 497 of the IPC, before it was struck down, criminalised adultery only as an offence committed by a man in relation to another man’s wife.
The wife herself was not treated as an equal actor in law; her sexuality was effectively placed within a structure of male control. Provisions such as Section 354 (assault/physical force outraging the modesty of a woman) and Section 509 (gestures/words outraging the modesty of a woman), though drafted for protection, also emerged from a vocabulary of female modesty and sexual honour rather than one of agency and self-determination.
Privacy and autonomy
In the present case, the judgment traces part of this history. It notes that colonial-era courts drew on traditional Hindu law to link unchastity to a woman’s sexual conduct.
The court cited the 1951 Minor Ramaiya Konar v. Mottayya Mudaliar case, where a woman living “in adultery or leading a life of unchastity” was disqualified from inheriting property, and noted that the Supreme Court was acknowledging the persistence of such views “as late as in 1999”.
For decades, courts largely operated within this societal framework.
The first notable rupture came in the 2017 Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India case, where a nine-judge bench unanimously held that privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21. Privacy, the court said, includes decisional autonomy and control over the dissemination of personal information.
More importantly, in Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2018), the court struck down Section 497 of the IPC, decriminalising adultery.
The Constitution Bench rejected the adultery law as resting on an antiquated notion that treated the wife as the property of the husband. The judgment condemned “anachronistic conceptions of chastity and honour” that had deprived women of dignity and privacy. It made clear that constitutional morality, not social morality, must be the touchstone.
In the present case, the court uses the same constitutional reasoning to reinterpret a chastity-based law so that it protects a woman’s autonomy instead. The court held that chastity cannot be understood “purely from a moral perspective focused on virtue alone”.
“Chastity of a woman should be understood as a person’s control over their own sexual choices, in light of freedom of self-determination… ‘Unchastity’ should then be read also as an action that interferes with the privacy and autonomy of one’s own consensual sexual activities. Any such interference would be a violation of the constitutional understanding of both privacy and dignity under Article 21,” the court said.
In this way, the question is no longer whether the woman has deviated from social norms of sexual virtue; it is whether another person has interfered with her control over her intimate life. The court also clarified that while a bathing video is not a sexual act per se, in the modern digital world such a video could be “warped and altered to create sexual connotations”, thereby wresting narrative control from the woman.
Dismissing a possible defence rooted in the parties’ consensual relationship, the court held that even if two people are in a consensual intimate relationship, that cannot create any right to bring private moments into the public domain.
This finding of the court has immediate relevance to the modern problem often described as revenge porn, or more precisely, image-based sexual abuse.
The structure of abuse in such cases is familiar: a former partner uses private sexual material, or the threat of its exposure, to coerce, punish or silence the other person.
The legal framework with regard to image-based abuse remains patchy. Digital abuse cases still depend heavily on police competence, forensic recovery and prompt investigation, and the court itself noted the investigative failure to recover the phone or the video.
Further, the present case also addressed a legal lacuna relating to evidence in criminal cases arising from interpersonal relationships. Intimate partner abuse has a structural feature that ordinary criminal procedure struggles with: the most important facts are private by nature, witnessed by no one outside the relationship.
The court addressed this through Section 106 of the Evidence Act, extending the ‘especial knowledge’ doctrine—traditionally applied to crimes in locked rooms or domestic spaces — to cover what it calls an “interpersonal realm”.
An intimate relationship, the court held, creates informational exclusivity just as surely as a locked house does. Effectively, once the prosecution makes out a prima facie case, the accused may be required to explain facts, especially within his knowledge. The man’s contention of “false evidence” did not satisfy the court.
Saumya Sharma is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism, currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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