 Image copyright Reuters Image caption Under the law the woman could not be punished as an abettor - the man was considered to be a seducer 
 
 India's top court has ruled adultery is no longer a crime, striking down a 158-year-old colonial-era law which it said treated women as male property. He quoted John Stuart Mill: “Legal subordination of one sex over another is wrong in itself.” 
 
 Indu Malhotra, one of two women among the 25 judges on the court, said: “The time when wives were invisible to the law, and lived in the shadows of their husbands, has long since gone by.” 
 
 There is no official data on how frequently men were prosecuted under the law, but it was often raised in divorce proceedings, lawyers say. The case, brought by an Indian businessman living in Italy, sought to have section 497 of the Indian penal code and another similar provision made gender neutral. He said in cases such as the adultery or homosexuality rulings, the court was dispensing with laws that had clearly fallen behind social mores. “Both laws based on the doctrine of a man owning his wife, the wife being property,” she said. The succession of high-profile cases provides a notable send-off for Misra, an at times controversial chief justice who has been the subject of public complaints from his fellow judges over his handling of politically sensitive cases. A five-judge bench of the supreme court unanimously ruled that the criminal offence of having a sexual relationship with a woman without her husband’s consent was archaic and deprived women of agency. The law had survived three previous legal challenges, the most recent in 1988. “In an ideal society I would totally agree with this judgment, but we are not talking about an ideal society,” she said. Lawyers for the central government had opposed scrapping the adultery law, arguing that diluting sanctions against infidelity would “result in laxity of the marital bonds”. Others said the top court should now move to make marital rape a criminal offence: 
 
 But a few felt that the law should have been made gender neutral instead of being struck down:
– "It is time to say husband is not the master," Dipak Misra, the chief justice of India's top court, says in a ruling striking down the country's adultery law. "Legal sovereignty of one sex over another is wrong." The ruling jettisoning the 158-year-old colonial-era law means adultery is no longer a crime in India, the BBC reports. Long criticized as archaic and sexist, it made it illegal for a man to have sex with a married woman without the permission of her husband. Misra said that while adultery could certainly be an issue in civil cases like divorce, "it cannot be a criminal offense." The law had been challenged three previous times, most recently in 1988. "I welcome this judgment by the supreme court," says Rekha Sharma, the head of India’s National Commission for Women. "It was an outdated law, which should have been removed long back." She notes that the law dated from the British colonial era—but the British got rid of their version of the law many years ago. Government lawyers had urged the court to keep the law, arguing that "making adultery legal will hurt marriage bonds." The Guardian reports that those who brought the case had only sought to make the law gender neutral, but the court decided to simply get rid of it. (Earlier this month, the court struck down a colonial-era law banning gay sex.)