Excerpts from my book Women and Domestic Violence Law in India: A Quest for Justice, 2019, Routledge

p. 54

Anti-arrack movements and alcohol ban protests have been held at various places where the agitating wives continuously have drawn attention to links between wife beating and their husbands’ drinking habits and that drunk men as husbands are vile and deviant who destroy the ‘sanctity of the family’. However, the discourse on domestic violence could not demonstrate the fact that these men are ‘incompetent’ to rule within their homes. Similarly, greedy men and their families who were burning brides or abandoning women to remarry to recollect dowry from other women could not be held accountable for their rapacious criminal acts. Rather, the authority of violent husbands could neither be questioned nor they were held accountable; instead, gruesome reports of wife battering have been suppressed under the garb of ‘protection’ and ‘privacy’. Domestic violence is not visualized as a ‘law and order’ issue by the state. Rather, the state promoted dowry and exploitation of girls in the guise of several schemes, such as Sumangli in Tamil Nadu, Arundhati in Assam, Laadli Scheme in Goa, and Rupashree in West Bengal. Marriage is an institution that reinforces patriarchy and subordination with regard to property, sexual oppression, division of labor, and reproduction – this construction has not been challenged. Ratna Kapur has rightly stated that the movement has pushed for equal rights without “disrupting the dominant, culture, familial and sexual norms that define Indian womanhood:.

In the cases of Tarvinder Kaur, Sudha Goel, Shashibala, Kanchan Chopra, and many others, the secondary status of women in marriage came to light. Despite repeated complaints of torture, these women were compelled to ‘adjust’ within the marriage until finally they were murdered. Yet, no efforts have been made to tackle this tremendous pressure on women to stay in violent relationships. The discourse on violence has not questioned the vulnerable position of a bride in her matrimonial household. Perhaps marriage is imagined as the only way to control women’s sexuality. Domestic violence is seen as an effect of the devaluation of the status of women, yet not much is done to eliminate the power imbalance with the hierarchical family arrangements.

Demands have been made to strengthen laws, but no interventions have been sought to create shelter homes, short-stay homes, or creches, or to provide medical facilities or legal aid to support victims of violence. Neither recommendations could be made to create conditions to facilitate women’s economic independence, nor material or emotional support could be imagined by the state or society. The independent existence of single women as citizens could not be conceptualized, while the idea of inequality within marriage has been upheld as divine above the rule of law. This nourished the right-wing ideology that co-opted the women’s movement agenda.