“Adultery is not a crime,” thus spake the honourable judges. People are bewildered to hear these unexpected judicious words in this land of ours which attaches great value to chastity and morality. Are the winds of change blowing so violently that every virtue would be thrown out of window?
It is ironic that values like equality, human dignity and freedom of choice are being invoked to legalise adultery. This heralds a process through which the time honoured moral values are being unceremoniously abandoned. It amounts to giving an open licence to men and women to indulge in illegal sex at their will.
Media is replete with the ‘gems of wisdom’ from the pens of learned and honourable judges. It is being presented as a battle between freedom, equality and human dignity on the one side and patriarchy, oppression and out-of-date concepts of chastity, fidelity and loyalty between husband and wife on the other. That is why it is being declared that Section 497 of IPC, which prohibits adultery and commands married couples to be faithful to each other, is now against the spirit of the Constitution. It is being said that married men and women are free to make their sexual choices even outside marriage. It has also been said that to be human involves the ability to fulfil sexual desires in the pursuit of happiness even outside marriage.
It means that the days of old-fashioned inter-spouse fidelity and loyalty are over and husband and wife need not confine themselves to each other to fulfil their sexual needs and like animals can utilise their sexuality wherever they think fit. Will this not turn our men and women into sexual animals? Is it not an open licence to promiscuity, lechery and immorality of the worst kind?
Your lordships! Please have mercy on the already corrupted society and allow good sense to plead for retention of endangered moral values. If it does not offend you, please rethink the decriminalisation of adultery. Otherwise, we fear, the day is not far away when the devils of immorality and lechery would be descending on our own courtyards and indulging in naked dance of adultery and sexual onslaught on our wives and daughters. And then there would not be any protection from sexual attacks. At that time humanity would weep and repent but there would not be any relief and deliverance from the wages of sin, which is death, death of humanity and death of civilisation.