Safe at home

New laws are markers in the evolution of public perception. In the 1980s, India recognised for the first time “cruelty by husband” as a crime when the Indian Penal Code was amended twice. It had taken a long while, street agitations and numerous dowry deaths for the state to accept that the husband — traditionally considered the chief guardian within the family — could be a flawed, indeed criminal, figure. A similar mythology had long attached itself to the marital home, celebrated in scripture and legend as the source of all bliss. But numerous cases of wife-beating, abuse and expulsion revealed that four walls can also hide assault and trauma. The Union Cabinet, by giving its assent to a Bill that aims to protect women from the entire gamut of domestic violence, is only acknowledging the fact that sometimes a home can be a dangerous place.

Three years ago, the NDA government had introduced a domestic violence bill which proved to be controversial because it appeared to recognise the crime only if the abuser “habitually” assaulted the abused. There was also an escape clause in that if a man claimed to have attacked his wife in “self-defence”, he had a good chance of getting away with his actions. It is believed that the present Bill does not suffer from similar infirmities but its full contours are yet to be known. Initial reports, however, indicate that there are some important provisions to protect all women — and not just the wife — caught in conflict situations within the home, including an expanded definition of what constitutes abuse, the right of residence in the home/matrimonial home and the right to obtain a protection order from a magistrate against further attacks.

Laws need to be deployed for the purposes they are intended — neither must they be decorative pieces of legislation nor instruments of blackmail. This is where we come up short because all too often law enforcers are willing to be used, either in failing to frame charges or in framing false ones. We need to now seriously consider how we can address this.