Describing live-in relationships as a reality, the Supreme Court on Monday expanded the ambit of Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code which deals with cruelty by a husband or his relatives and ruled that it would also apply to partners in live-in relationships, if an intention to marry was proven.The top court upheld a Karnataka High Court verdict refusing to quash proceedings for cruelty against a man who claimed exemption from prosecution under Section 498-A of the IPC, contending the provision was not applicable to live-in relationships.Giving the word “husband” a purposive interpretation keeping in view the reformative, corrective and socially beneficial intent of the provision, a Bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N Kotiswar Singh held that a woman in a “relationship in the nature of marriage” shall be protected under Section 498-A.“Section 498-A is held to be applicable to “live-in relationships” that qualify as “relationships in the nature of marriage” with the intent to marry being established as an intrinsic part thereof… The “live-in relationships” protected by Section 498-A, it is stated for ample clarity, are those that are between two consenting adult individuals,” it said.Writing the judgment for the Bench, Justice Karol said, “This distinction between “married” and “live-in relationship in the nature of marriage”, in as much as it relates to the protection envisaged by Section 498-A, has no rational nexus with the object of preventing domestic violence and is as such offensive to Article 14 of the Constitution of India (Right to Equality).”The verdict means a man in a live-in relationship can be prosecuted for subjecting his live-in woman partner to cruelty if the relationship is “in the nature of marriage”.The Bench, however, clarified that the proposition of law as laid down shall be limited to Section 498-A of the IPC only, and this extended interpretation shall not affect any other provision.“The safeguards against arrest and other factors as laid down in Arnesh Kumar (Arnesh Kumar versus State of Bihar – 2014) shall be strictly applied and no person in a relationship in the nature of marriage having been accused of committing cruelty against a woman, being either the live-in partner “in the nature of marriage” or his relative, shall be arrested without preliminary enquiries,” it noted.“Live-in relationships are today, more or less, a reality—primarily in urban areas (be it for whatever reason) where an increasingly large section of the population resides, and the law must adapt itself to serve those who choose this form,” a Bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N Kotiswar Singh said.The Bench said, “…if a woman is in a domestic setup even prior to marriage, which obviously, to a certain extent in the urban areas is a reality today, the protection given to married women should be given to them also. Cruelty, any which way, does not check at the door, whether the house it enters is that of a married woman or not. Once it enters, its propensity to destroy is aggravated.”“When the objective of the Section 498-A was to provide coverage to those cases where harassment by husband or in-laws through willful conduct causing mental or physical injury or driving the woman to suicide, then to say that such harassment can only be caused when they are married and not before that, in our considered view, would be a case of over simplification. Whether or not the woman in question is married, in the present day, does not have a proximate link to the objective of the Section, which is to prevent cruelty in such household settings,” the Bench said.