In the latest decision Thursday, Chief Justice Dipak Misra and the rest of the five-member court struck down a 158-year-old law that treated adultery in certain cases as a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison. The court called the law, which did not allow wives to prosecute adulterous husbands, unconstitutional and noted that a “husband is not the master of woman.” Adultery can still be grounds for divorce in India, the verdict said, but a criminal penalty violated women’s protection to equal rights under the law. “Section 497 destroys and deprives women of dignity and is destructive of women’s dignity, self-respect as it treats women as chattel,” the court’s decision stated. She said “a law that does not give women the right to sue her adulterer husband ... is unequal treatment and militates against her status as an individual.”

The rights group Amnesty International India said the decision was “a progressive judgment” and the old law was a “remnant of a time when a woman was considered to be the property of her husband.”

The scrapped law allowed men to file charges against other men who had affairs with their wives. This is the second colonial-era law struck down by India's Supreme Court this month - it also overturned a 157-year-old law which effectively criminalised gay sex in India.
The Supreme Court of India strikes down a law criminalizing adultery as unconstitutional, stating it treated women as property of their husbands.