Myth: "Adultery Is Legal Now, So It Doesn't Matter Legally"

The claim

“The Supreme Court struck down adultery, so it’s completely legal now — no consequences either way.” A common conclusion drawn from a real, correctly-remembered headline.

What the Court actually struck down

In Joseph Shine v. Union of India (2018), the Supreme Court struck down IPC Section 497 — the provision that let a husband have another man criminally prosecuted for sleeping with his wife, while the wife herself couldn’t be prosecuted at all and her own consent was irrelevant to the offence. The Court held this treated a wife as her husband’s property and was unconstitutional. The BNS, which replaced the IPC in 2024, did not bring the offence back.

What the Court explicitly did not touch

The judgment was clear that decriminalising adultery doesn’t make it legally weightless. It remains a valid ground for divorce under the Hindu Marriage Act and other personal laws — a spouse can still end a marriage by proving the other committed adultery. The spouse making that claim carries the burden of proving it, and — contrary to a separate popular myth — courts don’t require photographic or eyewitness proof; circumstantial evidence, assessed on the civil standard of probability rather than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt, can be enough.

Where it connects to maintenance

Separately, OIM’s Law Library entry on BNSS Section 144 already documents that a wife is disqualified from that specific summary maintenance route if she is “living in adultery” — courts have distinguished sustained adulterous conduct from a bare allegation or an isolated lapse, but the disqualification is real and sits entirely outside the criminal-law question this myth is about.

The verdict, precisely

Misleading. “No longer a crime” is accurate. “Doesn’t matter legally” isn’t — it’s still a live, provable ground for divorce, and it still interacts with at least one maintenance provision.

What this does not mean

It does not mean a divorce court will readily find adultery proven, or that every affair ends in a spouse losing a maintenance claim — the specific facts, and which statute is actually in play, still control the outcome. It means the criminal and civil questions are separate, and decriminalisation only answered the first one.