It took years of struggle by Indian women in the ’70s and ’80s—numerous grisly dowry case reports in the media after deaths in kerosene stove bursts became a mundane occurrence—for IPC Section 498A to come into being. The Supreme Court’s July 27 order, in one stroke, has undone two decades of fight that went into earning the legal framework for safety of women in matrimonial contexts. That women in our society need legal protection against dowry harassment from husbands or in-laws is a telling phenomenon.
The brutal crime against women we witness is a pointer to an existing, lingering vulnerability, despite political empowerment and the strides made in other spheres. If there were complaints of misuse of the law by some unscrupulous women and their families, the law should have been refined to plug the loophole. Just because law enforcement agencies are incapable of protecting innocent citizens from false charges, should those who need the protection of law be denied their right? Even if it’s granted that the law was to a degree lopsided, there could have been an informed debate, or a direction to the government to bring an amendment to plug the lacuna.
There’s no statistics to prove any large-scale misuse. Instead, the NCRB’s 2011 data lists 1,14,372 cases of registered crime against women in matrimonial homes. The low conviction rates cited by the court to set up a para-legal system of redressal—now groups of ‘do-gooders’, who can easily morph into vigilantes or mini-khaps, would sanction registration of cases by the police—is not unique to dowry cases.
Thanks to our tardy criminal justice, conviction rates are abysmal in most crimes, including rape. Why single out a law that saves women from being burnt to death in their homes? Thankfully, dowry deaths have been spared from a diluted definition. One has to die to even hope to get justice. But the scope for protection while a woman is still alive has evaporated, by legal decree.