The misuse of an act and criminalization of a society

 

Have you ever tried searching the term “false cases” in the Google search bar? Well it is not surprising that the suggestions that come up are abundant with Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code.  India is a country where marriage is considered as one of the most sacred institutions and yet it is also the only country with so many laws that in the garb of protecting the institution is actually destroying it from its very roots. One of the most controversial laws that have been doing the rounds of the Indian courts since its inception has been the Domestic Violence Act, 2005. Never before has a law been so glorified and so misused as this particular law with the exception of IPC Section 498A.

While it is an accepted fact that domestic violence in any relationship or household is considered as a violation of human Rights in almost any part of the world today, implementation of an effective and transparent mechanism to actually prevent such cases has been a dream that has turned into a nightmare for most people around the globe.

The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act,2005, popularly known as the DV Act, was brought into effect on 26^th October 2006. The broadly defined premise of domestic violence includes actual abuse or threat that is physical, sexual, verbal, emotional or economic. In other words, violence need not be purely physical alone as trying to deprive the woman of a decent life by not providing a decent maintenance also amounts to domestic violence. So, in a way the definition of domestic violence is not limited to abuse of a woman by a man but even deliberate failure to provide with basic amenities like food, clothing and shelter to the woman in a relationship is also a form of domestic violence according to the act. The magistrate of appropriate class is empowered to pass protection order(s) in favour of the complainant to protect her from further torture in the hands of the accused.

Whatever be the real intent of the legislature, more than a decade of observation of this law has provided us with some very unfortunate outcomes:

• .      Immense abuse of the process of law
• .    Destruction of an umpteen number of families and literally putting the Indian family system on the verge of shattering.
• .      Severe social and legal excruciation of the accused.
• .      Heavy wastage of productive manpower(men and women)
• .      Destroying the future of numerous kids.
• .      Destruction of the Indian culture and way of life, affecting adversely every religion in the subcontinent.
• .      Loss of face for the nation and a weapon for the anti-nationals claiming to be feminists.

Now, let us try and analyse why exactly a law intended for a very noble cause has turned into such a big failure for the system and leading to such destructive effects for a country that is so protective of its culture and traditions.

The DV Act has two glaring flaws in its very structure. Firstly, the law was heavily biased in its presumption of guilt of the accused. Accusation in itself can never be a presumption of conviction and in an attempt to ensure welfare of a certain class of people in the society the legislature in this particular case allowed emotions and populist agendas to defeat logical reasoning and framed a law that allows relief to an aggrieved and exacerbation of an accused even without minimum establishment of facts and issues.  There is a general tendency to consider the complainant as the victim but that necessarily is not always the case. This has led to numerous selfish women misusing the laws to torture their husbands and their in-laws and even sacrifice futures of their offspring.

This in turn has also led to parental alienation, mental imbalance and improper growth and development of generations’ altogether. Although this act is devised to protect the interests of the ‘victim’, instead it causes untold pain and misery to the ‘accused’ and his elderly family members. Even many legal experts has acknowledged that this act although had some honest intentions of protecting the victim, has actually caused more harm than good due to its misuse, misapplication and misinterpretation. Besides a person accused under this act remains socially stigmatized for his/her whole life irrespective of the outcome of the prosecution. Also, even though certain provisions exist in the Indian Penal Code, in practice there is no effective mechanism to address the issue of false allegations through penalty or compensation.

As a matter of fact, the Act has been framed in a way that incentivice false complaints, abuse of the process of law and going against one’s own family at the slightest of the altercations. The flaws in this law  also destroys working incentive for women and is an insult and discouragement to all the self-respecting women who wants to build their own career and fight their way to the top.

The act is heavily gender biased. It was framed with certain assumptions in mind which were not supported by facts but only by perceptions of the framers and guided by populist and emotional agendas instead of facts. There has been no proper data which can conclusively prove that women have been or still are the only recipient of domestic violence especially while including emotional and economical sufferings within the ambit. The study of gender-based violence against men has been deliberately taken off the table to use the non-availability of proper statistics as a ground to validate false and manipulated data in support of the counter-hypothesis.

The true intent of the act has been noble and praiseworthy, but the legislature and the judiciary as well as our society at large must realize that that framing any law based on non-justified illogical and purely manipulated emotional foundations and making it unnecessarily biased will result in multi-pronged disaster for the society. Every false case filed ruins a man at his prime, destroys his aged family members, his siblings and ruins their reputation, discourages self-respecting, educated and able-bodied women from working and be a part of the productive workforce of the nation. It is an insult to the women of our country who are fighting on their terms to make our country proud, leads to huge wastage of money, destroys a child’s future and thereby the future generation of our nation and valuable and already scarce man-hours of the judiciary and the police is misdirected and true victims suffer.

Due to slow-moving and overburdened judiciary, every false case gets added to the database of our crime records and ruins the reputation of our country which in turn is being used by pseudo-feminists with anti-national sentiments to scandalize the Indian way of life.

Therefore, the quasi-criminal law that was meant to protect women from domestic violence is actually causing more harm to men, women, children, every religion and the society at large. The sooner we realise the menace that it has been causing the sooner we can raise ourselves out of this soup and help our nation to progress further. Decriminalization of domestic violence and a strict measure against any kind of false case is the necessity of our times and must be taken care of by the judiciary and the legislature on a war footing.