CHENNAI : Last week, the Karnataka High Court was reprimanded by the Supreme Court for adjourning 14 times a case of domestic abuse involving a woman who was held hostage by her family. Twenty-five-year-old Meera Chidambaram, who was living and working in Dubai, was misled that her grandfather was sick and lured back to India, where she was forcibly confined by her parents within her uncle’s house. The legal case against her family was made by her partner, Kevin Joy Varghese, and his parents. Ms. Chidambaram’s parents’ abuse was because they had objected to their relationship. Forcible confinement is abuse, full stop. The Supreme Court has ordered her immediate release.
It has taken the Supreme Court to free an adult from a detention with absolutely no legal or moral basis because no one and nothing around her — her family, obviously, but also any person she was in a position to reach out to, the immediate and larger society around her — helped enough. Then, the Karnataka High Court behaved as a paternalistic and grievous enabler of abuse.
As I read this news, I was just over a year into my escape from an abusive situation that became severely exacerbated during the pandemic. I want to emphasise this: the pandemic worsened abusive situations around the world. Innumerable experiences will never be known. One of the ways in which I survived my abuse was because I was buoyed by the belief that I could someday be able to help others escape or heal by telling my own story. I haven’t yet. I haven’t been able to. There is survival, and then there is what actually happens during renewal — a word too beautiful for what the processes of acceptance and recovery are actually like.
So when I read about Ms. Chidambaram, and when I don’t quite write about myself, I wonder, as I have for years now: how many others? The Supreme Court, in its statement, said: “When the question of liberty of a person is involved, even a day’s delay counts”. So many couldn’t, or won’t, make it out.
I do not wonder how a 25-year-old woman living abroad found herself in such a horrific situation, I do not cast aspersions on her own motivations or her will or lack thereof, I do not say ridiculous and harmful things like “Why didn’t she just walk out?” because I know better. I did not need to go through what I went through to know this, because empathy need not come out of experience.
Empathy isn’t about the self, after all. Or what one imagines one would do in such-and-such situation. It is about holding space for what another can do within their circumstances, now, and may do should those circumstances expand to offer more choices. Meera Chidambaram is, by order of the Supreme Court, now free to take all her documents and leave the country, if she wishes to. Each time a struggle like this — and a victory like this — becomes public, it expands the possibilities for quieter liberations, setting or reinforcing precedents both legal and otherwise for the exercising of presumed but not practiced freedoms.
Sharanya Manivannan
@she_of_the_sea
The columnist is a writer and illustrator