WHEN 'I'LL MARRY YOU' IS A LIE! Why Goa’s courts are failing women…By Dr Olav Albuquerque & Deborah Cordeiro

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WHEN ‘I’LL MARRY YOU’ IS A LIE! Why Goa’s courts are failing women…By Dr Olav Albuquerque & Deborah Cordeiro

LAW, Sept 05- Sept 11, 2026 September 4, 2026 , by Goan Observer Team

A MAN tells a woman he loves her and will marry her. She believes him. They become intimate. Months or years later, he walks away — sometimes because his family objects to her caste or religion, sometimes because he simply loses interest, sometimes because he never meant to marry her at all. She goes to the police. And the case collapses before it even reaches trial. The Hemant Tiwari case, where the Goa High Court granted anticipatory bail to the accused, is just one example.
This is the reality behind one of the most misunderstood laws in India: the crime of having sex with a woman by falsely promising to marry her. It used to be prosecuted as rape under Section 376 of the old Indian Penal Code. Today it is a separate offence — Section 69 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) — carrying up to 10 years in jail. In theory, this law protects women. In Goa’s courts, in practice, it is proving to be a very difficult law to actually use.

The Rule Courts Follow — and Why It Lets Many Men Walk Free
THE Supreme Court, in cases like Dhruvaram Murlidhar Sonar v State of Maharashtra and Pramod Suryabhan Pawar v State of Maharashtra, has laid down a strict test. To convict a man, a woman must prove:

He never intended to marry her, right from the start. Not that he changed his mind later — that he was lying from day one.
Her decision to have sex was driven mainly by his promise of marriage, not by love or affection in general.
The break-up wasn’t caused by something outside his control, like his parents refusing an inter-caste or inter-religious match.
This sounds reasonable on paper. The problem is what it looks like in real life. A woman cannot read a man’s mind. Like the diabolical Mahanad Naik who raped and killed 15 or more women in Goa, between 1994 and 2009, gullible women believe men who want only sex. By the time she realizes he never planned to marry her — the law asks her to go back in time and prove what he was thinking years earlier. Very few women have love letters, messages, or witnesses that spell this out. Most simply have his word, and later, his silence.
This is exactly why lawyers who have handled these cases in Goa and across India say that genuine victims very often cannot meet this evidentiary bar, while men who did deceive them walk away describing it as “just a broken relationship.” The same excuse — “my family didn’t accept her” — can be a true hardship or a convenient shield used by a man who never had honest intentions in the first place. Courts have no reliable way to tell the two apart, and in practice, they tend to give the accused man the benefit of the doubt.

How This Plays Out in Goa
GOA’S police stations — Panaji, Bicholim, Curchorem, Mardol, Colvale and others — record such complaints every year, from women who say they were sexually exploited under a promise of marriage that was never kept. Several patterns repeat themselves in these cases:
• Cases involving legally married couples get dismissed on a technicality. In one Goa case decided by the Bombay High Court at Goa in 2025, a woman alleged her husband had misled her about a religious wedding ceremony he never fully honoured. Because the couple already had a valid civil marriage on paper, the court held there was no “false promise” to speak of — even though the woman’s actual grievance was about being misled regarding customs important to her. The FIR was quashed.
• “She was mature enough to understand consequences.” In cases involving long relationships, courts have repeatedly reasoned that an adult woman who continued a relationship for months or years must have known what she was doing — effectively treating her ongoing trust in a man’s word as proof that she wasn’t really deceived. Critics point out that this reasoning can be used to excuse men regardless of how convincingly they lied, simply because enough time passed before the truth came out.
• A “no-objection” from the woman becomes grounds for bail, even while investigation is ongoing — a practice women’s rights advocates say can pressure survivors, especially in a small state like Goa where families and accused men often move in the same social circles and survivors face pressure to “settle” quietly rather than pursue a case.
• Family or community opposition is accepted almost automatically as an excuse, without asking whether the man used that possibility as a convenient cover story he could always fall back on if things “didn’t work out.”

Section 69 BNS: A Law With a Built-In Escape Hatch
WHEN the government replaced the IPC with the BNS, it carved this offence out of rape law and gave it a lighter maximum sentence — 10 years, instead of the 10-years-to-life that rape carried. Supporters call this a “progressive separation.” But several legal scholars, including commentary published in the Oxford Human Rights Hub, and Indian legal researchers writing in the Economic and Political Weekly, have asked what “deceitful means” actually is with any precision. It implies courts are free to interpret it narrowly — and they usually do.
By treating a promise of marriage as something a woman “trades” her consent for, the law quietly assumes women don’t have full ownership of their own sexual choices unless a marriage is dangled in front of them. Ironically, a law meant to protect women’s dignity ends up reinforcing the old idea that a woman’s intimacy is only “valid” if it’s backed by a marriage promise — and that idea is then used by defence lawyers to argue that grown women “should have known better,” rather than holding the men who lied to account.
Meanwhile, because the law is written in gender-specific terms and demands proof of a man’s inner thoughts, prosecutors say it remains one of the hardest offences to actually secure a conviction under — even in cases where the surrounding facts strongly suggest a woman was deliberately exploited.

What This Means for Goa
NONE of this means every complaint is genuine — a small number of cases anywhere involve false claims, and courts are right to filter those out. But the pattern in Goa’s courts suggests the opposite problem is at least as serious: a legal test so difficult to satisfy that it protects dishonest men far more often than it punishes them, while leaving genuinely deceived women branded as having simply “made a bad relationship choice.”
For Goan women, family pressures around caste and religion, this matters. The law is supposed to hold men accountable for using marriage as a tool of seduction, but it asks victims to prove something impossible — a man’s private intentions from months or years earlier — while giving him a ready-made list of excuses if he’s caught.