The need to define marital rape as a separate offence is a matter of acknowledgement, of the trauma that thousands of women go through in our country and side-lining of the issue merely on the apprehension of misuse belittles the basic level of dignity that a country owes to its women. For the last many centuries, the sanctity of our culture and Indian values has been held in such a high and superficial bubble that it has managed to evade necessary interference in family lives, in order to protect the right of a person against another. Apart from the vagueness of the excuses to evade the topic, there is a severe lacuna of the pre-requisites required before marital rape can be criminalised, that is, lack of parameters for the definition of the offence, the lack of updated laws of evidence and more importantly, acknowledgement and sensitization.
