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Consent has become a popular word in pop culture today. We see it in Instagram reels, in feminist poetry, in campus campaigns after orientation. Yes means yes. No means no. That is the simplified narrative. But Indian criminal law has never treated consent as simple. It treats consent as a complicated terrain full of suspicion, moral judgment, and historical patriarchy.

This is the core problem. The law of this country still does not trust women to define the truth of their own bodies.

The structure of the law creates distrust.

The architecture of consent in the Indian Penal Code was not drafted from the standpoint of female autonomy. It was drafted from the standpoint of regulating sexual access. Women were cultural property. Consent became something that was supposed to be proved like an alibi. The criminal law, after the 2013 reforms, tries to sound modern and neutral. But the instinctive suspicion remains. Judges still ask why she went to the location. Why did she not scream more? Why did she text him afterwards? The legal mind cannot imagine consent as a relational act. It imagines it like an evidentiary defence.

Coercion is too narrowly defined.

Section 375 now has an explanation that says consent must be unequivocal and voluntary. There is also an explicit part that says consent obtained through fear of death or hurt is not consent. But what about fear of being abandoned? What about emotional manipulation? What about a college girl saying yes because she knows saying no will cause public humiliation? Indian law does not see coercion that is social or psychological. It sees only physical threat as real.

This is not aligned with how women experience harm.

The law wants a perfect victim.

The ideal Indian rape victim is a unicorn. She is pure. She resisted. She fought. She had no prior relationship. She had no prior sexual history. She immediately complained. She did not send a single text that can be read ambiguously. The criminal courtroom becomes a moral battlefield where lawyers measure a woman’s purity instead of her autonomy. Most women know this. This is why most women do not even file complaints.

Marital rape remains legal and exposes the hypocrisy.

Marital rape is still legal in India. This one fact alone exposes the actual internal logic of our law. If consent was truly about bodily autonomy, then it should apply inside marriage and outside marriage. But Indian law protects marriage more than it protects women. The Indian State fears the collapse of the heteropatriarchal family structure more than it fears the collapse of a woman’s body under forced sex.

Queer consent is still invisible to the law.

I am queer, and I have seen how queer consent practices are miles ahead of State law. Queer communities created continuous consent, check-in consent, enthusiastic consent, aftercare, and safe words. These frameworks did not come from law. They came from lived vulnerability. Indian criminal law still imagines sexuality only in hetero terms. Queer harm has no protected vocabulary. This is a problem because queer communities have already built better ethical practices than the State. The law remains stagnant because it cannot imagine sexual behaviour outside of one man and one woman.

Consent is not the absence of a no.

Indian law remains stuck in a negative definition. It keeps asking: Did she say no? Modern feminist jurisprudence states that consent is the presence of a yes. Silence is not consent. Uncertainty is not consent. Fear is not consent. The problem is our criminal courtrooms cannot handle nuance. They want binary answers. But sexual interaction is not binary. It is relational. It is contextual.

Human truth underneath doctrine

As a femme-presenting queer person and as a woman raised in Indian society, I have agreed to acts I did not want because the price of saying no felt higher than the price of surrender. This is not unique to me. This is common. Consent looks clean in textbooks. In real life, consent is influenced by gender scripts, power, fear, and social control.

Consent is legal in theory. But refusal is social in practice.

What needs to change

I think three changes are necessary.

First, consent must be presumed. The woman should not have to prove she is telling the truth. The accused should have to prove consent existed.

Second, coercion must be understood in a wider sense. Psychological pressure is real. Emotional manipulation is real. Punishing nonphysical coercion is necessary.

Third, queer harm and queer consent must be recognised. Criminal law must expand beyond the cis hetero frame.

conclusion

Consent is not a fashionable feminist slogan. It is not an NGO poster. It is not an Instagram reel. Consent is autonomy. Consent is dignity. Consent is the sovereignty of the body in a legal order that has historically stolen that sovereignty and given it to fathers, husbands, police, and judges.

The point of consent law is not to invent perfect victims. The point is to create a world where saying no is possible without punishment.

We are nowhere near that yet.

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