Section 498A IPC is now Section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, with the explanation of cruelty in Section 86, in force from 1 July 2024. The offence is non-bailable and carries up to three years.
What to do in the first week
- Take a decision on anticipatory bail under Section 482 BNSS, before the Sessions Court.
- Get the FIR and read who has been named. These complaints frequently name the entire family. Courts are alive to that.
- Stop all direct contact with the complainant and her family. Every message becomes evidence.
- Preserve your evidence: messages, call records, photographs, travel and employment records, anything establishing where people actually lived and when.
Why courts scrutinise these cases carefully
- Arnesh Kumar (2014): for offences punishable with up to seven years, police must not arrest mechanically and must record reasons. The Section 35 BNSS notice procedure applies.
- Courts have repeatedly criticised omnibus allegations sweeping in elderly parents and married sisters in other cities with no specific act attributed to them. Quashing petitions for such relatives succeed reasonably often.
- Several states route these complaints through a Family Welfare Committee or similar conciliation step before arrest.
A note on tone
Publicly declaring the case false, on social media or anywhere else, tends to hurt. It can attract its own consequences and it hands the other side material. Fight it in the court file, not online.
Publicly declaring the case false, on social media or anywhere else, tends to hurt. It can attract its own consequences and it hands the other side material. Fight it in the court file, not online.
The realistic path
Anticipatory bail first. Then either a quashing petition under Section 528 BNSS for relatives named without any specific allegation, or a defence built for trial. Where the marriage is genuinely over, many of these matters end in a comprehensive settlement that includes quashing.