NEW DELHI: The Uttarakhand high court has quashed a rape case registered against a man who was accused of establishing a physical relationship with a woman on the false promise of marriage. The court held that the two had met on the dating app Tinder and entered into a consensual relationship, which cannot later be treated as rape merely because it broke down without ending in marriage. The court quashed the FIR and all related proceedings on July 16.How did the Tinder relationship lead to a rape case?According to the court order, the woman first came in contact with the man on the dating app Tinder in August 2019. The two started talking and soon became close friends. Later, the man came to Haldwani to meet her, and the two went to visit Bhimtal and Hanuman Dham together. The next day, they went to the hotel where he was staying, had some drinks, and ended up in a physical relationship. After this, the two continued meeting regularly and she alleged that he used to visit her every second and fourth Sunday — and stayed involved with each other for months.The woman later claimed that the man had repeatedly promised to marry her, and that she had continued the relationship trusting that promise. But after the covid lockdown, she said his attitude changed — he began avoiding her and kept giving excuses, including his father’s ill health, to delay the marriage. She also said she reached out to his family for help, but they did nothing. It was only when she saw on Instagram that he had gotten engaged to someone else that she realised he had no intention of marrying her. Feeling cheated, she went to the police and filed an FIR accusing him of rape on the false promise of marriage.The man then approached the high court to quash the case. His counsel argued that the relationship was completely consensual from the start, that Tinder is not a matrimonial app but a platform for making friends, and that he had never actually promised to marry her — so the case, he alleged, should not have been filed in the first place.Why did the Uttarakhand high court quash the rape proceedings?After examining the FIR and the evidence, Justice Siddhartha Sah held that the complainant was a mature adult who had entered the relationship of her own free will.It noted that the parties had met through the Tinder app, remained in a relationship for a considerable period, and that the evidence on record did not indicate that the accused had made a false promise to marry from the very beginning merely to obtain her consent.“From the above, it is clear that the respondent no. 2 was a mature person who, out of her own free will and accord, entered into a physical relationship with the applicant. If subsequently, the relationship turns sour and did not culminate in marriage, that by itself cannot be a ground to term the relationship between the parties as one involving physical relationship on the false pretext of marriage,” the court observed.The court also found that the relationship was not a brief encounter but had continued over a considerable period, during which the parties met frequently and maintained contact, making it difficult to infer that the physical relationship was induced solely by a false promise of marriage.“It is evident that the respondent no.2 entered into a physical relationship with the applicant out of her own free will and accord… the applicant and the respondent no.2 met each other through the Tinder app, and there was no such alleged promise to marry,” the bench said.The high court concluded that the allegations, even if accepted at face value, did not make out the offence of rape on the false promise of marriage. It said continuing the criminal proceedings in such circumstances would amount to an abuse of the legal process.“In the overall facts and circumstances of the case… it is clear that the matter does not appear to be a case of entering into physical relationship by the applicant with the respondent no.2 on the false pretext of marriage. Accordingly, in such circumstances, the further continuation of the proceedings under Section 376 of the IPC against the applicant would amount to an abuse of process of law,” the bench added.Accordingly, the high court allowed the petition under Section 482 CrPC and quashed the FIR, the charge sheet, the summoning order and all consequential criminal proceedings pending before the trial court.
