Opinion Tread carefully

Even today, much of the well-meaning chatter on women’s safety imagines her in need of protection from the sexual predator at night, or the assailant on the street. It’s a comforting illusion, for both state and society. The real disempowerment of a woman, however, begins at home and the family. The institution of marriage is loaded against women in India, where dowry continues to have social sanction and is one of the main reasons why women face domestic violence. Which is why the deliberations within the government, as reported by this paper, to introduce an amendment to the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, to allow the mother-in-law in the family to file a complaint under the act, are disquieting.

When the act was passed in 2006, it was a landmark piece of legislation because it recognised the fraught politics of this idealised space of ghar-parivar. It did more. It gave a woman victim of domestic violence — dowry-related or otherwise — the right to not be thrown out of her matrimonial home by abusive in-laws, which in most cases, she does not own. Through an immediate protection order passed by the court, she could buy for herself a breather from persistent violence, even if she lived with the abuser. It gave her the right to decide whether to escalate her complaint from a civil to a criminal one. Despite the bad press Section 498A has received, many women would rather suffer violence than file criminal complaints against their families.

Advertisement

The act, as it stands now, cannot be used to file a complaint against a woman — a male is the primary respondent, with a provision for his female relatives to be the secondary one. Tinkering with the immunity to the daughter-in-law could open the floodgates to counter-complaints by mothers-in-law, at the behest of men who would want to misuse the law, straining an already tardy legal process. When there are other recourses in the law for mothers-in-law faced by such violence, the government should not fall into the trap of a false equivalence in changing a law meant to address the specific biases against women in the family. It should tread cautiously before it tinkers with a law that is for many women their only ally in surviving the reality of daily, demeaning violence.