ABSTRACT
This chapter looks into the context of constitutional rights that gets subverted in the process of judicial decision making and adjudication. The main argument of the chapter is located in understanding the judicial discourse on rights of women in the context of violence in intimate relationships. The vicissitudes of violence against women in the household needs special attention to understand the historical deep-seated argumentation of judicial decision making in India. Such violence against women is often explicitly decriminalized or treated in a more or less ineffectual manner by the criminal justice system. The chapter mainly takes up two issues that involve intimate relationships - domestic violence and marital rape - to substantiate the responsiveness of the state/court through its decisions. It addresses the larger question of limits of procedural justice and substantive moral dilemmas that emerge in statutory interpretation by the courts. How does the justice system stratify its subjects? The author argues that institutionalization of ‘otherness’ in production of counter-subjectivities in law reflects on the inconsistencies between constitutional morality and legal adjudication in the larger discourse of rights in India.
