India, Aug. 4 -- The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a man in a live-in relationship that is "in the nature of marriage" can be prosecuted for the offence of cruelty towards a woman, holding that excluding such women from the ambit of the penal law merely because they were not formally married would amount to discriminatory treatment.

In a judgment that significantly expands the reach of India's law criminalising cruelty by a husband or his relatives towards a woman, a bench of justices Sanjay Karol and N Kotiswar Singh held that although Section 498A in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) uses the expression "husband", the provision cannot be interpreted so narrowly as to deprive women in marriage-like relationships of criminal remedies agai...