The Supreme Court Speaks on Sex (Part I)

Our Supreme Court has been around for sixty years and in this interim, it has given expert opinions on various issues of utmost importance. Recently, I started looking for the Supreme Court's orders on sex. It started because I remembered this famous judgment I read years ago. Phul Singh v. State of Haryana (for those who have access to legal databases, the citation is AIR 1980 SC 249). When I read the order again, I realised it was far funnier than I remembered it.

Justice Krishna Iyer, in his inimitable style starts his order thus:

"A philanderer of 22, appellant Phul Singh, overpowered by sex stress in excess, hoisted himself into his cousin's house next door, and in broad day-light, overpowered the temptingly lonely prosecutrix of twenty four, Pushpa, raped her in hurried heat and made an urgent exit having fulfilled his erotic sortie."

After setting out some more facts, he goes on:

"We must, however, direct our attention in a different penological direction. For sentencing efficacy in cases of lust-loaded criminality cannot be simplistically assumed by award of long incarceration, for often that remedy aggravates the malady. Punitive therapeutics must be more enlightened than the blind strategy of prison severity where all that happens is sex starvation, brutalisation, criminal companionship, versatile vices through bio-environmental pollution, dehumanised cell drill under 'zoological' conditions and emergence, at the time of release, of an embittered enemy of society and its values with an indelible stigma as convict stamped on him-a potentially good person 'successfully' processed into a hardened delinquent, thanks to the penal illiteracy of the Prison System. The Court must restore the man.

"A hyper-sexed homo sapiens cannot be habilitated by humiliating or harsh treatment, but that is precisely the perversion of unreformed Jail Justice which some criminologists have described as the crime of punishment.

"It may be marginally extenuatory to mention that modern Indian conditions are drifting into societal permissiveness on the carnal front promoting proneness to pornos in life, what with libidinous 'brahmacharis', womanising public men, lascivious dating and mating by unwed students, sex explosion in celluloid and book stalls and corrupt morals reaching a new 'high' in high places. The unconvicted deviants in society are demoralisingly large and the State has, as yet, no convincing national policy on female flesh and sex sanity. We hope, at this belated hour, the Central Government will defend Indian Womanhood by stamping out voluptuous meat markets by merciless criminal action...

"This reflection apart, we must, as part of the sentencing package, design a curative course for this prisoner to rid him of his aphrodisiac overflow and restore him into safe citizenship."

Sire, take a bow. Now to cleanse myself (a libidinous brahmachari) of bio-environmental pollution.

(I have discovered some other gems. Will put them up when I get the time to mine them and produce relevant extracts.)