Abstract
This article examines whether Indian law has genuinely transformed marriage from a status-based institution protected by domestic privacy into a relationship governed by constitutional equality and public accountability. It adopts a doctrinal and analytical method, reading the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 alongside the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and leading constitutional and matrimonial decisions. The article develops an “accountability gap” thesis: Indian law now regulates a wide range of physical, emotional, sexual, and economic harms within domestic relationships, but continues to preserve status privileges where regulation would unsettle the legal meaning of marriage itself. Judicial decisions expanding the concepts of respondent, shared household, and domestic relationship have strengthened access to civil protection. At the same time, safeguards against unnecessary arrest have sometimes been absorbed into a broader misuse narrative that can obscure under-reporting and weak implementation. The clearest contradiction is that sexual abuse is actionable under civil domestic-violence law while forced sexual intercourse by a husband remains excluded from the general rape offence when the wife is an adult. The article argues that this inconsistency cannot be justified by marital privacy, evidentiary difficulty, or the availability of lesser remedies. It concludes that reform should preserve fair procedure while eliminating status-based immunity, strengthening implementation under the 2005 Act, and defining protection by vulnerability and coercive control rather than conformity to an idealized form of marriage.