Their romance began at work. She asked him out for coffee with her friends. He took her out for lunch. Dinners and walks in New Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens followed. Then, for 18 months, they were in a sexual relationship.

But last year, when Pavan Gupta turned 24, his parents began pressuring him to marry. When they introduced him to a girl he liked, Gupta ended his relationship with his girlfriend, telling her he could not disappoint his parents. “I liked her but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her. I always told her I was an only child and would have to go along with my parents’ choice,” says Gupta.

In March, as Gupta was preparing for his wedding, Jain went to the Delhi police and accused him of rape. She said she had slept with him only on promise of marriage and, since he had not married her, consent was procured on a false pretext, making the sex rape.

“Even if I had misled her and told her I’d marry her, it still wouldn’t make the sex rape. How can consensual sex for over a year be rape?” asks Gupta.

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In January this year, the Supreme Court ruled that rape cannot be invoked in cases of consensual sex after a relationship ends and the man declines to marry the woman, for whatever reason. The judges said a clear distinction had to be drawn between the two. But the ruling is of no help to Gupta. His life has already been shattered. His mother had a heart attack a week after she learned of the accusation against him. She died a few days later. His fiancee called off the wedding. He lost his job. The trial is dragging on because Jain frequently does not attend hearings.

Something strange is going on in India. Women are becoming more educated and confident. Pre-marital sex is on the rise — a hotel chain called StayUncle offers rooms for an hour or two to couples seeking somewhere to have sex. But at the same time, so are the number of women alleging rape on false promise of marriage. According to the National Crime Records Bureau , a total of 38,947 rape cases were reported in India in 2016. In 10,068 cases — about a quarter — the women claimed it was rape on false promise of marriage.

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“When a relationship ends, women who have had consensual sex make false accusations of rape under promise of marriage out of vengefulness, to hurt the man. Or they do it to extort money out of him, promising to withdraw the charge if he gives them what they want,” says lawyer Vinay Sharma.

In many cases, false rape accusations are simply the result of parents covering up the “shame” of an unmarried daughter having sex. Research carried out in 2015 by journalist Rukmini Shrinivasan, who worked for the Hindu newspaper at the time, revealed that when parents discover their unmarried daughters are in a sexual relationship, their horror at potential “dishonour” to the family name leads many to make spurious allegations of rape, having first bullied their children into submission.

By their logic, saying a daughter has been raped is preferable to people thinking she is sexually active. Shrinivasan stumbled upon this finding after discerning a pattern in the charge sheets she examined in Mumbai. Time and again, it was the same story: the victim had been picked up in a moving car, given a drink laced with sedatives to render her unconscious, and raped. The recurrence of the sedative-laced drink seemed striking. Then the penny dropped. “This allegation is important because it is necessary to show that consent was not given, to protect the girl’s reputation,” says Shrinivasan.

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Men’s rights groups and some lawyers believe these false allegations of rape by women who have been in consensual relationships trivialise the seriousness of rape. Even more troubling is that the notion of sex constituting rape if a man “reneges” on a promise of marriage is not in the penal code. The only solace for men who have been falsely accused is that many of these cases are thrown out of court. The SC ruling in January, for example, related to a nurse at a government hospital in Maharashtra. She was a widow who fell in love with a doctor and moved in with him. After living together for some years, he left her and married someone else. The judges said that having lived with the man for some years, the nurse could not allege rape. They pointed out that it was possible the doctor, on account of circumstances he could not have foreseen or could not control, was not able or willing to marry her. Whatever the reason, it was not rape. The doctor was acquitted.

Vivek Deveshwar, a software engineer in Bangalore who runs a men’s rights group, believes that parents who make false allegations of rape are encouraged by the fact that rape victims’ identities are not revealed. Consequently, there is no social embarrassment. “I believe a man’s identity should also be kept secret until the trial is over and a verdict has been reached. It would spare innocent men a lot of anguish,” he says.

Names of the accused men have been changed to protect their identity. Reprinted with permission from The Guardian

