Rewrite her social contract

While the Vajpayee government is widely acknowledged to have carried forward the economic reforms initiated by the Narasimha Rao government, the gender reforms undertaken by the current regime are an untold but fascinating tale. It’s fascinating because these gender reforms are despite the fact that the BJP never really foresook, much less denounced, its ideologue Shyama Prasad Mukherjee’s fundamentalist position in the fifties that the Nehru government’s project of introducing modern notions like monogamy and divorce in the Hindu personal law was “anti-Hindu” or “anti-Indian”.

There seems to be, in fact, a curious reversal of positions between the BJP and Congress in this regard. The gender reform spirit seems to have atrophied within the Congress around the time the Rajiv Gandhi government ushered in the computer revolution. Who can forget the law enacted to appease Muslim fundamentalists in the wake of the Shah Bano verdict? The Congress never quite recovered from that ideological compromise as it tried to offset the Muslim Women’s Act with the reopening of the makeshift temple in the Babri Masjid.

In an ironic twist, the BJP, the party accused of demolishing the mosque, seems to have taken over the Nehruvian mantle of gender reforms. Look at the corpus of evidence:

• In 1989, the Law Commission recommended the abolition of the ceiling of Rs 500 as maintenance to destitute wives under Section 125 CrPC. It was under this very provision that the Supreme Court granted relief to Shah Bano. Successive Congress governments did nothing about this ceiling fixed back in 1955. It was left to the Vajpayee government to delete the ceiling in 2002 and mandate that the court orders maintenance within 60 days of the notice.

• If Section 125 CrPC has been amended for the benefit of indigent wives, the Vajpayee government has also amended the Hindu, Christian and Parsi personal laws to provide quick alimony in all divorce cases.

• On Christmas, it may be apt to recall the reforms made by the present government in the Christian personal law on the Law Commission reports of 1983 and 1998. It removed the Victorian anomaly under which no Christian wife could get a divorce unless she established that her husband committed adultery. Now she can obtain divorce just on the grounds of cruelty or desertion and even has the option of dissolving the marriage by mutual consent.

• On the basis of the Law Commission reports of 1980 and 2000, the Vajpayee government amended the Evidence Act to ensure that in rape cases, the defence are not allowed to question the victim about her “general immoral character”.

• The amendment enacted in the latest session of Parliament permits a woman married as per Hindu rituals or the secular way to institute divorce proceedings wherever she is residing. Under the earlier law, she was forced to go to the court which had jurisdiction over the venue of her marriage or where she last lived with her husband.

Much as they are important, the reforms made so far only scratch the surface of the gender problem. There is still a long way to go. The good news is that gender reforms have been quietly going on for the last three years. Civil society needs to maintain vigil so that the reforms stay on course. There is also a need to contribute in finetuning reforms proposals. The pending Domestic Violence Bill, for instance, has a flawed definition. A victim, however battered, can seek relief under this law only if she can prove that she has been subjected to ‘‘habitual assault’’.Another dubious Bill is the one that reduces dowry harassment to a compoundable offence..