Opinion Dowry cruelty and legal apathy: Why India still loses one woman every hour

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) defines “cruelty” against a woman by her husband or his relatives as “any wilful conduct which is of such a nature as is likely to drive the woman to commit suicide or to cause grave injury or danger to life, limb or health (whether mental or physical) of the woman; or harassment of the woman where such harassment is with a view to coercing her or any person related to her to meet any unlawful demand for any property or valuable security or is on account of failure by her or any person related to her to meet such demand.” The stipulated punishment for the commission of the said crime is imprisonment for up to three years and imposition of a fine. Similarly, assault and abuse of a child by someone entrusted with her care and protection entails a punishment of up to three years, as per the Juvenile Justice Act. A punishment of less than seven years puts these crimes outside the threshold of automatic arrest, as per the directives of the Supreme Court. In theory, arrest is not entirely impossible in crimes punishable with less than seven years of imprisonment. The reasons for the need to arrest can be recorded by the Investigating Officer in the case diaries to make a plea to the court. However, the experience on the ground is that rarely do police investigators display such a nuanced and sensitive approach to case documentation, nor does the magistrate concerned accord any weightage to the aggravating circumstances of a particular case, which demand the husband to be put away for some time to safeguard the victim and create a fear of the law.

When it finally results in the wife’s suicide or death in unnatural circumstances, commonly dubbed as “dowry death,” it invites a penalty of at least seven years imprisonment, extendable to life and immediate arrest of the husband. It is almost as if the law is baiting adamantly abusive men to push the thresholds of cruelty till the death of the wife, for until then, there is little the system will do to stop them. It is, thus, no surprise that India still records, on average, about one dowry death every 1.2 hours.

It is interesting to find out why the same laws against domestic cruelty and dowry harassment that fail to control the crime in rural, small and medium towns are increasingly misused against men in more urban and educated pockets. The answer appears to lie in the broad demographic differences. While arrest may not be an immediate threat, an educated person employed in the formal economy has much to lose with a FIR registered against them. But those employed in informal sectors are more immune to such repercussions. Aware, educated women also have the wherewithal to exert pressure on the husband, and pursue their cases with the police and the courts via independent lawyers, mounting fear. Rural and less educated women, on the other hand, are often financially and socially dependent on their husbands, with little or no support even from their own families. As a natural corollary, the offence of cruelty by husband sees one of the lowest conviction rates of a mere 15 per cent, despite constituting the largest quantum of reported crimes against women. Lack of resources to pursue protracted trials, absence of dedicated courts, inherent behavioural and legal biases in the criminal justice system, and the difficulty of proving the allegations compel millions of women to “settle” the cases for paltry sums of money or by learning to live with recurrent abuse.

The seriousness of the scale of domestic violence, affecting lakhs of women, must not be undermined merely because it doesn’t cause sensation as cases of rape or murder do. Rather, the sheer number of cases forces us to think about the existing lacunae in the criminal justice system. Courts must carefully scrutinise the aggravating circumstances meriting arrest when the woman or children concerned are unable to get away from the abuser and where the abuse is recorded in the medical examination of the victims. Infrastructure and capacity of District One Stop Centres, run by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, must be expanded, and the referral of serious cases of abuse from police stations to OSCs, to remove women and children out of harm’s way, must be institutionalised.

Women Welfare Committees along the lines of Child Welfare Committees ought to be established at District level for providing immediate succour to women in extreme distress — a basic allowance for sustenance, shelter, medical help, counselling, legal guidance, and some impactful form of rehabilitation, especially employment, with the support of local NGOs, business associations, government departments and prominent citizens, and regular follow up in cases where the victim eventually returns to her husband post mediation or counselling. The law must find ways of shielding both the endlessly abused as well as the indisputably innocent.

The writer is an IPS officer. Views expressed are personal