Myth: "The Supreme Court Called 498A 'Legal Terrorism' and Said It Should Be Scrapped"

The claim

A screenshot circulates every few months: “Supreme Court says 498A is legal terrorism.” It’s usually posted as though the Court struck the provision down, or at least ruled that most complaints under it are false.

Where it actually comes from

The phrase is real. It’s from Sushil Kumar Sharma v. Union of India, decided by the Supreme Court on 19 July 2005. A petitioner asked the Court to declare the matrimonial-cruelty provision (then IPC Section 498A) unconstitutional, and to order courts to punish anyone whose complaint turned out to be unfounded. The Court wrote that misuse of the provision “may be characterised as ‘legal terrorism.’”

What the Court actually did

It rejected the petition. The provision was held constitutional. The Court’s reasoning was explicit: the possibility that a law can be misused is not, by itself, a reason to strike the law down — that logic would invalidate most of the criminal code. The Court also declined to write new guidelines curbing the provision’s use, on the basis that remedying misuse through the courts wasn’t the right mechanism — it said that was a job for the legislature, not for judges rewriting procedure from the bench.

The verdict, precisely

The phrase “legal terrorism” is a genuine quote from a genuine Supreme Court judgment, used to describe the misuse of the provision. That is different from the Court ruling the provision itself illegitimate, ordering it narrowed, or making any finding about what share of complaints are false — this case decided none of those things. A single sentence, quoted without the paragraph it sits in, is doing work here that the actual judgment doesn’t do.

What this does not mean

It does not mean concern about false complaints is baseless — the judgment itself acknowledges misuse happens and can amount to “legal terrorism” in individual cases. It means citing this one line as though the Supreme Court struck a blow against the provision, or ruled on how common misuse is, overstates a 20-year-old dictum well past what it actually established.