Case Summary: V. Revathi v. Union of India 1988

Key Facts

Detail
Court	Supreme Court of India (M.P. Thakkar and M.M. Dutt JJ.)
Citation	AIR 1988 SC 835; (1988) 2 SCC 72
Date of judgment	25 February 1988
Petitioner	V. Revathi (a wife seeking the right to prosecute her husband)
Respondent	Union of India
Provision challenged	§198(1) read with §198(2) CrPC (who may complain of adultery), in the context of §497 IPC
Constitutional ground	Article 14: hostile discrimination on the ground of sex
Holding	Petition dismissed: §198(2) CrPC is not discriminatory, since neither spouse can prosecute the other
Later overruled by	Joseph Shine v. Union of India, AIR 2018 SC 4898 (5-judge bench)

Background: Section 497 IPC

Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code 1860 criminalised adultery in asymmetric terms. It provided that a man who has sexual intercourse with a woman he knows to be the wife of another man, without that husband's consent or connivance, commits adultery, punishable with up to five years' imprisonment or fine or both. Two structural features made §497 distinctive:

• Only the man could be prosecuted; the woman was expressly exempt and could not be punished even as an abettor.
• Only the husband of the adulterous woman could file a complaint under §198(2) CrPC; the wife of the adulterous man had no standing to prosecute.

This architecture reflected Victorian-era assumptions that a wife's sexual fidelity was her husband's property interest to protect, while a husband's fidelity attracted no criminal sanction at the instance of his own wife.

Challenges to Section 497

The Revathi petition was neither the first nor the last challenge to §497:

Case	Petitioner's complaint	Outcome
Yusuf Abdul Aziz v. State of Bombay, AIR 1954 SC 321	Man argued: why should only the male be punished for adultery, not the woman?	§497 upheld; Art 15(3) ("special provision for women") permits this differential treatment
Sowmithri Vishnu v. Union of India, AIR 1985 SC 1618	Wife argued that §497 denied her any right to prosecute her husband or the other woman, and did not cover husbands' relations with unmarried women	§497 upheld; such arguments went to the policy of the law, not its constitutionality
V. Revathi v. Union of India, AIR 1988 SC 835	Wife argued that §198(2) CrPC unlawfully stopped her prosecuting her adulterous husband	§198(2) CrPC upheld (this case)
Joseph Shine v. Union of India, AIR 2018 SC 4898	Joseph Shine, a non-resident Keralite, challenged §497 IPC and §198 CrPC under Articles 14, 15 and 21	§497 struck down by a 5-judge bench; adultery no longer a criminal offence

The Petition: What Revathi Argued

V. Revathi filed a writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution. The law barred her from prosecuting her husband in two ways. Section 497 IPC defined the offence so that only the man with whom a wife had relations was the offender, and §198(1) read with §198(2) CrPC allowed only the husband of the woman to complain of it.

Her argument was narrow. Whether or not a husband could prosecute a disloyal wife, she said, a wife could not lawfully be stopped from prosecuting a disloyal husband. To the extent that §198(2) CrPC stopped her, it was unconstitutional as obnoxious discrimination on the ground of sex. The judgment deals with this argument under the equality clause, Article 14.

The Court's Reasoning

Thakkar J., writing for the Court, dismissed the petition. The Court noted that the same argument had already been rejected in Sowmithri Vishnu (1985), in a challenge to §497 itself, and described this petition as the same bullet being fired at §198(2). The reasoning ran as follows:

1. Neither spouse can prosecute the other. A husband cannot prosecute his wife, because only a man can commit the offence. A wife cannot prosecute her husband, because of §198. The law does not arm the two spouses "to hit each other with the weapon of criminal law".
2. The spouses are left to "make up" or "break up". The Court saw the underlying philosophy as promoting social good. Spouses can forgive each other and stay together, or seek a divorce from a matrimonial court, but cannot send each other to jail. Children are perhaps also spared the trauma of one parent being jailed at the instance of the other.
3. A "legislative packet" aimed at the outsider. §497 IPC and §198 CrPC go hand in hand to punish an outsider who invades the matrimonial home, subject to the rider that only the erring man is punished.
4. No discrimination against women. If the outsider is a woman she is not punished, so the Court called this "reverse discrimination" in favour of the woman rather than against her. Husband and wife received even-handed treatment, since neither could secure the other's imprisonment.

The Court added that it is the arbiter of the constitutionality of a law, not of its wisdom or philosophy.

The Joseph Shine Overruling (2018)

Thirty years after V. Revathi, a five-judge Constitution Bench in Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2018) unanimously struck down §497 IPC, and §198 CrPC so far as it applied to adultery. The 2018 bench overruled all three earlier precedents (Yusuf Abdul Aziz, Sowmithri Vishnu, and Revathi) and held:

• §497 treats a wife as the husband's chattel, violating her dignity and autonomy under Art 21.
• The provision is manifestly arbitrary under Art 14 (the Shayara Bano "manifest arbitrariness" standard).
• A husband cannot be the "licensor" of his wife's sexuality; the consent/connivance exception in §497 ("without the consent or connivance of that man") embodies a patriarchal proprietary view incompatible with constitutional morality.
• Adultery between consenting adults is a purely private matter; its criminalisation violates the right to privacy (K.S. Puttaswamy, 2017).

Adultery is no longer a criminal offence in India, and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 did not re-enact it. It may still be relevant as a ground for divorce under civil personal laws.

Significance of V. Revathi

Though ultimately overruled, V. Revathi matters for three reasons:

1. It crystallised the asymmetry. The case forced a precise statement of the scheme's internal logic: a wife had no standing to complain about her own husband's adultery. Its answer, that the law discriminated in favour of women, became a target for later criticism.
2. It completed the doctrinal record. Revathi, Sowmithri Vishnu, and Yusuf Abdul Aziz together formed the body of reasoning that the Joseph Shine bench examined and overruled.
3. It illustrates constitutional evolution. The same provision was upheld in 1954, 1985, and 1988, then struck down in 2018. The shift reflects not a change in the text of Arts 14/15/21 but a deepening of what constitutional equality requires in a changing society.