The video and news reports of violence against Sindhu Sarma, daughter-in-law of Justice Nooty Rama Rao, a former judge of the Madras and AP High Courts, are deeply shocking, and yet, perhaps not. The idea of women’s autonomy and integrity within the marital home (not just in marriage) is one that lacks takers in high places even today.
Despite Justice PA Choudary’s celebrated judgment in the Sareetha case three decades ago, in which he actually dared to bring the “cold principles of constitutional law” into the torturous environs of the “harmonious family”, lawmakers and judges alike have been unwilling to follow the route taken a century and a half ago by Rukhmabai when she challenged the restitution of conjugal rights, reiterated by Justice Choudary in 1983. Nor is Nooty Rama Rao the first judge in the state to be accused of abusing his daughter-in-law/wife.
Impunity in men’s conduct in conjugality underwrites the course of (in)justice for married women. And we have been silent witnesses. There is no public censure, no sense of collective outrage that this is even possible, no dent in the public standing of persons who dehumanize women in their families in multitudinous ways in full public view. The toxic icing on this poisoned cake is the legality of marital rape in India: “Sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape.”
To our efforts to list dowry-related violence in the Indian Penal Code and seek civil and criminal protection from domestic violence to mark the graves of the dead, burnt and violated young women in marital homes, has been added a news report that includes a video of a High Court judge participating in the collective abuse of his daughter-in-law in the presence of her infant child — the only little soul in the video intervening to shield the mother from battery.
It is heart-rending to witness the child’s persistent attempts to intervene, and even more painful to think of how grossly children in violent homes are abused by merely being forced to witness violence on their mothers. This violence is not even named as violence and never enters the account. The child is a non-consenting witness to abuse that results in immeasurable, long-term harm. Can we even begin to understand that?
Our complacency as a society to violence within the home and to the normalization of violent male spousal conduct has serious implications for our understanding of women’s autonomy and integrity as independent citizens. Do women consent to abuse in marriages when they consent to marriages in a deeply unequal and fractured society? Clearly no. But do they have the legal capacity to consent to marriage and not consent to abuse within marriage? As it stands now, no. Women’s fates are sealed in one of the following situations: consenting to marriage within the boundaries of caste/community endogamy; soft (if not hard) coercion to “consent” (“arranged” marriages); and consent to unequal marriages in the absence of any access to “imagined domains” of freedom where women are concerned, to borrow from celebrated legal scholar Drucilla Cornell.
In a society where women are actively denied any positive conception to personhood, submitting to oppressions of hetero-patriarchal marriage exists on a continuum that begins with children bearing witness to extreme violence in the home (and bearing the scars of this experience life-long) to women being killed simply for the reason that murder of wives and rape within marriage are protected by impunity for the relations of a woman by marriage. A judge and a common man on the street equally enjoy this guarantee of impunity and are indistinguishable for each other.
The Supreme Court itself has participated in this equivocation by its ruling of 2017 to “prevent misuse of Section 498A IPC” that contravenes legislation on domestic violence: by constituting a committee, barring arrest of the accused for six months, issuing guidelines and demanding an action taken report. As noted jurist Upendra Baxi observes, this is a suspension of the law on domestic violence by the Supreme Court, no less. We could of course extend this to other domains of routine sexual oppression (public and private) but there is no reason to overstress the point. This far is painful enough.