Adultery is not an offence under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. In Joseph Shine v. Union of India…

A five-judge Constitution Bench in Joseph Shine v. Union of India, decided on 27 September 2018, declared the adultery offence (formerly s.497 IPC) unconstitutional as violative of Articles 14, 15 and 21. The provision was manifestly arbitrary (Article 14): it punished only the man, treated the wife as her husband's property because the act ceased to be an offence if the husband consented or connived, and gave the wife no remedy against her own husband. It rested on gender stereotypes (Article 15) and offended dignity, autonomy and sexual privacy (Article 21).

The BNS enacts no corresponding offence, so adultery is no longer a crime, although it remains a ground for divorce. The other options either rely on Articles 16, 19 and 25, on which the decision did not rest, or leave out Articles 14 and 15.