If love is blind, so is justice. Long after a boy, then 19 years old, eloped with his 16-year-old girlfriend from rural Punjab and the two had sex, the boy — now a man — stands convicted for rape by the Supreme Court and will spend the next three years behind bars.

The girl being a minor, her consent to sex did not help mitigate the boy’s offence. For, law terms sex with a minor, with or without her consent, as rape.