A 43-year-old man wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office and the women and child development ministry against rape charges levied against him by a girl who promised marriage to him.

In his petition, the man claims that while men get rape charges pressed against them for ending a relationship, he was pressed with one for keeping it. He claims that the lady was not interested in marrying him but only in continuing with their sexual relationship.

Arnab Ganguly is a businessman who moved to Gurugram in 2015 after being divorced for eight years.

He had set up a call centre, where he met this lady. “She was working as an HR executive for my company. After sharing an employer-employee relationship for a couple of months, she started sharing her personal life with me. She used to talk about her painful marriage, and having undergone divorce myself, I used to tell her how she could set it right,” Ganguly told.

After the woman expressed her love for Arnab, he asked her if she would want to divorce her husband.
“At the age of 42, I did not want a mere boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. We got physically intimate only after she assured me of marriage. I told her that if she is serious about the relationship, we should take it a step forward. She asked for time and said she will give a final decision in January (last year),” he said.

He soon realised that the woman was trying to avoid marriage. “I told her I would come to meet her and her family on March 6 of last year and talk about their marriage. But four days before my ticket to Delhi, the Delhi police arrived at my house in Kolkata and arrested me on rape charges,” he said.

After spending eight months in Tihar, Ganguly decided to write to the lawmakers to intimate the use of the draconian law against the innocent.

In his petition to the PMO, he said, “If a girl is in a relationship with a man, promised to marry him, gets physically intimate and then refuses to marry him that happened in my case, can a rape charge be filed against the girl?”

It took 6 years for Arnab to prove his innocence.