RIGHTS-INDIA: Domestic Violence Bill No Comfort to Battered Women

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Apr 25 2002 (IPS) - For years, Susheela slaved and saved as domestic help to build the house of her dreams – a two-room shanty on the outskirts of the Indian capital for her family of three children and her petty tradesman husband.

It never occurred to her that on a bitingly cold day winter day in December last year, her husband, following an altercation over missing money, would beat her up and turn her out of the house they jointly own.

An appeal at the local police station earned her more abuse and a warning that she had better patch up with her husband. “What can I do? I have nowhere to go and it is all right for a husband to beat his wife every now and then,” Susheela said, resignedly.

Susheela’s attitude is not uncommon in a country where the status of women is markedly low. Indeed, a survey conducted by the International Institute for Population Sciences and published by the health ministry less than two years ago found that 56 percent of Indians actually endorsed or accepted wife-beating.

Despite the culture of silence around the subject, the health ministry’s National Family Health Survey has succeeded in getting information about domestic violence. Twenty percent of married women it surveyed admitted that they had been physically mistreated after reaching adulthood, usually by their husbands. “The percentage is obviously much higher,” an official of the survey said.

Such is the internalisation of gender inequality that little was expected from the Domestic Violence Bill introduced in Parliament on Mar. 8, as a nod to International Women’s Day by the unabashedly patriarchal, pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

A former president of the women’s wing of the BJP, Mridula Sinha, is on record as saying that wife-beating and domestic violence can often be justified — and that there are cases when women provoke a beating.

Ancient scriptures, which are steadily coming back into vogue thanks to an aggressive Hindu revivalist movement undertaken by the BJP, hold that “‘like a drum, women and low caste people improve upon being beaten”.

Predictably, the domestic violence bill fell short on several of the counts that have been regularly raised by women’s rights groups, which are now pressing for substantial amendments such as inclusion of the right of residence in the husband’s home.

According to Indian tradition, once a woman is married she ceases to be a member of the parental household and her return is considered inauspicious and therefore to be discouraged. Few women dare to set up residence on their own, even if they can afford it, for fear of sexual and other harassment.

The same ancient scriptures, authored by the increasingly oft-quoted lawgiver, Manu, require females to be under the discipline of the father as a girl, under the discipline of her husband after marriage and that of her sons in old age.

According to the Lawyers’ Collective Women’s Rights Initiative (LCWRI), the right to a matrimonial home is a major omission since it makes a woman vulnerable to unfair settlements and blackmail.

In a statement, the LCWRI pointed out that a battered woman is left to choose between returning to more beatings in a violent home or getting a divorce with unfair terms such as giving up rights to assets or support.

Typically, as in the case of Susheela, police officers are not supportive. “Almost invariably the police take the attitude that domestic problems are an internal matter of the family and it is best for the woman to compromise, ” said, Ranjana Kumari who runs the Centre for Social Research (CSR), a leading women’s organisation.

Besides, complaining to the police or even to women’s support groups can result in worse harassment back at home, since the woman is then considered to have disgraced family honour by going public.

But the powerful All-India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), an affiliate of the Communist Party of India- Marxist (CPI-M) that is bitterly opposed to the ruling BJP, sees the domestic violence bill as endorsing existing retrograde social beliefs such as the view that the male has a right to resort to violence.

The general secretary of the AIDWA, Brind Karat, points to provisions in the bill that exempt the aggressor from charges of causing injury or harm to a woman as long as he was protecting himself or his property or even someone else’s property.

“Anybody can make the plea that an assault was made in self-defence or that his property was threatened and thus indirectly prevent a woman from removing what may be her property,” Karat said.

Even the very definition of domestic violence under the bill seems to endorse male violence indirectly. The bill limits the definition to ” conduct in which a woman is habitually assaulted or her life is made miserable by cruelty even if such conduct does not amount to physical treatment or as a result of which she is forced to lead an immoral life, is injured or harmed.”

According to activists, the devil is in the word “habitually”, which implies that occasional assaults on a woman is fine and leaves it to a judge to decide what is occasional and what is habitual.

The bill defies the spirit of the of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which includes all possible violence that could be perpetrated on a woman within the family setting. India is a signatory to it.

Still, the LCWRI acknowledges in a statement that the bill, for all its shortcomings, does get the government to officially recognise the fact of domestic violence.