Live-in deed signed and later cancelled by consent: Gujarat High Court upholds acquittal in rape case
Justices Ilesh J. Vora and R. T. Vachhani dismissed a survivor appeal against acquittal, holding that two written deeds affirming free consent, the testimony of her own father and uncle, and the failure to seize the original agreements left the false promise of marriage case unproved.
A college student in Ahmedabad signed a written deed in August 2019 declaring that she was going to live with her partner of her own free will and that the two would marry once he turned 21. In January 2020 the two signed a second deed cancelling the first and recording that they were parting without pressure or threat. The next day she lodged a complaint of rape on a false promise of marriage and assault. A Sessions Court acquitted the man in January 2026. On 21 October 2026 a division bench of the Gujarat High Court, Justice Ilesh J. Vora and Justice R. T. Vachhani, dismissed her appeal against that acquittal, holding that the two deeds, the evidence of her own family, and gaps in the investigation left the trial court's view a plausible one that an appellate court could not disturb.
The complaint and the trial
According to the complaint, the survivor, then in her second year of college, had been in a relationship with the accused for about a year. He worked at a showroom. On the morning of 13 August 2019 she went to his house, and the two presented themselves at a police station, from where his parents and uncle took her away. Because he was of a tender age, a mutual agreement was executed between them on 14 August 2019. She alleged that he induced her to stay with him on a promise to marry her when he reached marriageable age, that for about two months at his house he forced physical relations on her on that false promise and beat her when she refused, and that after differences with his parents the couple moved to a rented house where the same conduct continued, along with demands for money.
On the morning of 29 January 2020, she said, he told her they would marry on her birthday two days later and asked her to have the agreement cancelled. When she refused he threatened to take his own life, and out of fear the agreement was cancelled by mutual consent. He then took her on his motorcycle to the Motera Stadium and left her on the road. She returned to her father's house by auto-rickshaw and, with her father, lodged the complaint on 30 January 2020 under Sections 376, 376(2)(n) and 323 of the Indian Penal Code.
The police recorded witness statements, drew a panchnama of the scene, seized the clothes of both, had both medically examined and sent samples to the Forensic Science Laboratory. The accused was arrested on 8 February 2020 and later bailed. A chargesheet was filed on 24 September 2020 before the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Court No. 9, Ahmedabad, and the case was committed to sessions, where it became Sessions Case No. 457 of 2021. Charge was framed on 23 August 2022. In his statement under Section 313 of the Code the accused said his mother had lodged a complaint against the survivor under Sections 323 and 294(b), and that she had filed a false case to escape it. He denied forcing relations, demanding money or assaulting her, and said that since he was below marriageable age it could not be believed he had induced her with a promise of marriage. He led no defence evidence.
On 31 January 2026 the Additional Sessions Judge, Court No. 7, City Civil and Sessions Court, Ahmedabad, acquitted him on the benefit of doubt under Section 235(1) of the Code.
What the survivor argued on appeal
The judgment's opening paragraph describes the appeal as one by the State under Section 413 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, but the cause title and the submissions treat it as the survivor's own appeal, with the State's Additional Public Prosecutor, Mr L. B. Dabhi, supporting her. Her counsel, Mr Rishabh R. Jain, invoked the proviso to Section 372 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which lets a victim appeal an acquittal, and said that as a first appellate court the High Court could re-appreciate the whole evidence and interfere where the view below was not a possible one, material evidence had been ignored, or the law misread.
His central point was the cancellation deed of 29 January 2020. He conceded that the survivor did not deny signing it, but argued that the trial court should have looked at the circumstances: the accused had told her that morning that they would marry on her birthday, had assaulted her, and had procured the fresh deed on that pretext and under threat. A document obtained that way, he said, could not be treated as voluntary or relied on to acquit.
He also argued that the trial court had recorded no finding at all on the physical assault, although medical officers had testified to multiple injury marks on her body; that the court itself noted she had stood by her account in examination-in-chief and cross-examination yet discarded her testimony without reasons; and that an FIR lodged the day after the cancellation deed could not be an afterthought. Even if the deed were valid, he submitted, it could not efface the offences or answer the independent charge under Section 323, which the medical evidence supported. The State adopted the same submissions and asked that the acquittal be set aside.
What her own witnesses said
The bench, in a judgment authored by Justice Vachhani, heard the matter at the admission stage and went through the record. It began where the trial court had: with the history the survivor gave the doctor who treated her. In that history she said she had known the accused for a year, that the two were in love, and that for the last eight months they had been living together under a friendship agreement, a maitri karar. The bench treated this as a contemporaneous account in her own words, given long before her deposition, describing a consensual and continuing relationship with no mention of force, coercion or deceit. The prosecution, it said, had not explained how that account could be reconciled with an allegation of forcible intercourse.
Her father, in cross-examination, said she had gone to stay with the accused after asking him, that she had entered the agreement with her consent, that the agreement had since been cancelled, and that at no point while she was away or after she returned had he made any written application against the accused at any police station. A father who lets his daughter go, does not complain while she is away and does not dispute that she acted with consent, the bench said, cannot be said to support a case of forcible intercourse. Her uncle, PW-13, admitted in cross-examination that she went with the accused of her own will. The owner of the rented house, PW-14, said the two stayed there as husband and wife and that the survivor never told her that her husband was harassing her. The bench called the landlady an independent witness who saw the couple's daily life, and said that had the survivor been forced, beaten or threatened as alleged, some sign of distress would ordinarily have reached the person she lived with.
The two deeds
The deed of 14 August 2019, executed when the accused was 20, was reproduced in translation. In it the survivor declared that she would stay with him only so long as she wished and trusted him, that he had offered no greed, temptation or threat to make her stay, that no pressure, inducement or allurement had come from anyone, and that she was acting of her own free will in a sound state of mind. It recorded that the two would take decisions about their life freely and would marry each other by consent once he attained 21.
The deed of 29 January 2020 recorded that both were pursuing their studies, that differences of temperament had arisen, and that they had decided of their own free will, without harassment or threat, to live separately so that she could continue her studies. It cancelled the earlier deed and all its terms. The bench observed that this document, executed at the very end of the period covered by the charge, contains no recital of any beating, threat to die or forcible intercourse, and matches the admissions of her father and uncle. When two adults who have lived together for months under a written arrangement declaring free consent end it by another written instrument that again affirms the absence of coercion, the bench said, a case that the relationship was throughout the product of a false promise and repeated force becomes difficult to sustain. The cancellation deed was not something the law required, but it lent direct support to the finding that the physical relationship rested on continuing consent and that the separation was voluntary.
The bench added that an agreement of this kind is opposed to public policy and unenforceable. Its stated purpose was that the accused would marry the survivor on reaching marriageable age, and a person debarred by age from contracting a marriage cannot make a binding promise to do so; the document's probative value on that score was nil. But that cut against the prosecution rather than for it. This was not a case of a promise to marry made with a dishonest intention from the outset to obtain sexual favours. The parties entered a written agreement to live together by mutual consent and later mutually cancelled it. An adult who lived with the accused by her own consent, the bench held, could not bring the case within rape on a false promise of marriage.
Hostile panchas and unseized agreements
The trial court had found material contradictions and omissions in the survivor's evidence, noted that the panch witnesses did not support the panchnamas and were declared hostile, and recorded the investigating officer's admission in cross-examination that the original agreements referred to in the complaint were never seized. The bench found those findings well founded. The survivor's deposition was the foundation of the case; once it was shown to be inconsistent and the supporting witnesses either turned away or gave evidence favouring the accused, it could not be called wholly reliable. The failure to seize the originals was a serious omission, because the whole prosecution case was built on those agreements and the representations said to have been made under them. Without the originals the prosecution had not proved how the agreements were obtained or that they were procured by deception, and the recitals on record stood unrebutted. Medical evidence and investigative material, the bench said, can show that an incident occurred or that steps were taken, but cannot replace reliable evidence of the accused's involvement where the main evidence is itself doubtful.
The law on a promise to marry, and on live-in couples
On the scope of an appeal against acquittal, the bench referred to Tulasareddi alias Mudakappa v. State of Karnataka, 2026 INSC 67, for the rule that interference is confined to exceptional cases of perversity, that the acquittal strengthens the presumption of innocence, and that routine interference where another view is possible must be avoided. On consent, it extracted paragraphs from Ravish Singh Rana v. State of Uttarakhand, which in turn draw on Pramod Suryabhan Pawar, Deepak Gulati v. State of Haryana and Sonu alias Subash Kumar v. State of Uttar Pradesh: a promise vitiates consent only if it was false when made, a mere breach is not a false promise, and a consensual relationship of a year and a half ending in a refusal to marry was no basis for an FIR.
Applying that law, the bench noted that the relationship predated 13 August 2019, that neither side disputed the physical relationship or that they lived together in rented accommodation as a live-in couple, and that the accused was not of marriageable age when the deed was signed. Where two adults live together as a couple for a considerable period, it said, a presumption arises that they chose that relationship voluntarily and with full awareness of its consequences. There was no allegation that the relationship would not have existed without the promise. In a long live-in relationship, the bench went on, a wish expressed by the parties to formalise it through marriage does not by itself show that the relationship was a consequence of that wish; women today are often financially independent and able to chart their lives on their own terms; and a dispute between the partners cannot be given the colour of a criminal prosecution. A court faced with such a case “must not adopt a pedantic approach” and will, from the length of the relationship and the conduct of the parties, presume implied consent to it regardless of any desire to turn it into marriage.
The long relationship, the cohabitation in a separate rented house with the knowledge of the survivor's parents, and the two undisputed deeds together gave rise to a presumption of valid consent. A refusal to marry, the bench held, could not expose the accused to prosecution for rape. The allegations of sexual assault and of force used to extract the cancellation deed, it said, “do not inspire much confidence” and had rightly been rejected in light of the surrounding circumstances and the recitals of the settlement.
Order
The bench held that the trial court's view was a plausible one on the evidence, that it found no perversity or legal infirmity in the appreciation of evidence, and that the benefit of doubt was rightly extended to the accused. The finding that the prosecution had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt called for no interference. R/Criminal Appeal (Against Acquittal) No. 2273 of 2026 was dismissed on 21 October 2026, and the record and proceedings were ordered to be remitted to the court concerned. The acquittal of 31 January 2026 in Sessions Case No. 457 of 2021 stands.