Never Forgive, Never Forget

 Never Forgive, Never Forget

As a child, I was taught—like many others—to forgive and forget. It came wrapped in the language of morality, kindness, and virtue. Religion urged us to turn the other cheek. Schools encouraged us to be the “bigger person.” Families taught us to keep the peace, to move on, and to not hold grudges. Every institution, every cultural narrative, seemed invested in erasing the memory of pain, no matter how deep it ran.

But as I grew older—and especially as I lived through the experience of violence—those teachings began to ring hollow. The more I tried to forgive, the more invisible my pain became. The more I tried to forget, the more my body remembered. The scars did not fade with time. The hurt did not dilute into wisdom. In fact, the pressure to "heal" through forgetting felt like another form of violence—this time, psychological. A quiet silence wrapped in the language of peace.

As a survivor of violence, I began to question everything I had been taught. Forgiveness was not liberating—it was demanded. Forgetting was not healing—it was forced. Society doesn’t ask perpetrators to change or to remember what they’ve done; it demands that survivors carry the burden of moving on. We are told to forgive so that they can feel comfortable, and to forget so that they are not held accountable. In this way, "forgive and forget" is not a path to healing—it is the language of the oppressor.

In my work as a lawyer and social worker, I hear the pain of women every day. Their stories, spoken through trembling voices or buried beneath layers of shame and silence, awaken the rage I carry inside me—rage that is not just mine, but shared. When I listen to these stories, I feel a deep clarity: this anger is not a weakness. It is a memory. It is a refusal to allow what happened to us to be erased. It is a declaration that the past matters—that what was done to us should not be smoothed over in the name of social comfort or institutional convenience.

“Forgive and forget” is a luxury for those who have not suffered. It is a strategy of denial, a performance of civility that enables abuse to continue unchecked. It erases the long shadow that violence casts across a survivor’s life. It sanitizes injustice. It allows systems of power—patriarchy, caste, class, racism—to remain intact, because memory is dangerous to power. Memory is revolutionary.

Survivors speak a different language. A truer language. One that does not flinch in the face of discomfort. We say: Never forgive. Never forget.

We do not say this because we are cruel or bitter. We say it because remembering is how we survive. We say it because justice begins with memory. We say it because forgiveness, when demanded rather than earned, is another form of subjugation.

To never forget is not to wallow in the past—it is to name it. To give it shape. To claim our truths without shame. To never forgive is not to live in hate—it is to insist on accountability. It is to say: what happened was wrong, and no amount of time or social pressure can make it right.

This language disrupts the narrative of the “strong, silent survivor.” It unsettles those who would rather look away. But as survivors, we owe it to ourselves and to each other to speak it. Because forgetting does not bring peace—it only guarantees that history will repeat itself.

So we remember. We name names. We tell our stories. We pass them down. We keep the memory of our pain alive, not because we are broken, but because we are whole enough to refuse to lie.

Never forgive. Never forget.
This is the language of survival.
This is the beginning of justice.
This is how we build a world where no one is ever asked to forget what they had to survive.

When Every Home Became a Chamber of Confinement

 When Every Home Became a Chamber of Confinement

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world into lockdown, streets fell silent, offices shut their doors, and families retreated within the sanctity of the home, in the name of safety. But for countless women, “home” did not mean sanctuary—it became a prison, a torture chamber, or a concentration chamber. A site of terror. A sealed chamber of confinement, echoing with the violence of men who now had unrestricted access to their victims.

During those months, I was inundated with calls and messages from women—some desperate, others resigned. Each voice carried a different kind of fear, but all shared a common thread: they were trapped with their abusers, and the outside world had disappeared. Their options were few, and their pleas felt like cries into an abyss. Some of the episodes of violence were so painful that I felt helpless.

Courts were closed. Any support became inaccessible. No one around to help. One cannot go out to seek help from family, friends, or neighbors. Even otherwise, stigma has prevented many women from speaking up or calling for help in such matters.

As a lawyer and a social worker, I have long engaged with violence in its many forms, but something about this moment felt distinctly heavier, more suffocating. The volume, the intensity, and the utter helplessness struck with an unprecedented force. I could not understand what had happened and how I should respond to the gravity of the situation.  

I had no framework for the sheer collapse of the protective systems that women so precariously rely on. No tools seemed adequate. No intervention felt swift or strong enough. The anxiety and futility of being helpless overtook me. Every woman I talked to enhanced my anger against the system and society. The horror of atrocities beyond the human realm shook my humanity.

Some stories were so brutal that they left me shaking, sleepless. The weight of those disclosures settled into my chest, pressing heavily with each retelling. The feeling of impotence—of knowing and yet being unable to act with immediacy—was psychologically paralyzing. I found myself haunted not only by their pain, but by my own. Their stories resurrected old ghosts: my own experiences as a victim and survivor of violence. I have known what it feels like to be unheard, unseen, and dismissed. I recognized the silence on the other end of the phone when words failed. The pauses between breaths, when fear clutches the throat. The tears of pity, the melancholy of the universe, engulfed me again and again, reminding me of the horrors of my own past as a victim and a survivor of violence.  

The sense of experience of drowning in the pain and sufferings and sheer immediacy of the terrifying moment nullifies the existence of the trapped body and spirit. I was forced to confront a terrifying realization of how homes, the so-called safe spaces, for many, become chambers of unspeakable suffering. The term "lockdown" began to feel less like a health mandate and more like a state-sanctioned trap.

In the midst of it all, I began to question the very structure of our society. What kind of world have we built where a crisis, meant to preserve life, so casually sacrifices the lives of the most vulnerable behind closed doors? The metaphor that kept surfacing in my mind was unsettling but accurate: had every home become a kind of concentration chamber? A place where bodies were controlled, confined, and broken—psychologically and physically—without witness or escape?

The mind, desperate for solace, searched for antidotes—distractions, reassurances, rationalizations. But nothing offered clarity. In fact, the very act of trying to process the violence—while being surrounded by it, unable to stop it—only intensified my inner disquiet. My thoughts raced. And each new story brought another layer of anguish. It was not simply a professional crisis—it was a moral and existential one.

I tried to hold space for their voices, knowing that many of them were struggling even to find language to describe their pain. The trauma was too deep, too fresh. And not all could afford the emotional cost of telling the whole story. Some had no time, no privacy, no faith that it would matter. I listened—fully, quietly—but I often felt inadequate. I stood bare before their vulnerability, my own scars no shield against the enormity of theirs.

These interactions were more than cases or complaints. They were testaments to the terrible things human beings can do to one another—and how systemic neglect allows that terror to thrive. We often imagine violence as isolated, as personal pathology, but it is also deeply structural. It flourishes where institutions are indifferent, where silence is rewarded, and where patriarchy is allowed to dominate unchecked.

The memories of those months linger like smoke in the lungs. I fear they will never fully leave me—or the women who lived them. They have become a dark residue in our collective memory, a permanent tear in the fabric of time. A hole in the moral ozone layer of our shared history. Through that rupture, what seeps in is not only the memory of a horrific past, but a warning: when society prioritizes safety in abstraction without considering whose safety is truly being protected, we risk repeating these cruelties over and over again.

We cannot afford to forget what the lockdown revealed: that for too many, the greatest danger was not outside, but within the walls of their own homes. And if we continue to turn away, to relegate domestic violence to the private sphere, we become complicit in that suffering. We owe it to the witnesses, the survivors, and the silenced to listen, to act, and to refuse to accept this as normal.

 

 

 

 Dowry involves a triad of oppression

“Dahej naari jaati ka apmaan hai”

"Dowry is an insult to females.”

(A slogan raised against the immoral practice of dowry in post-independent India)

Cameron (2014) categorised the financially abusive partners into three categories: controllers, exploiters, and schemers. According to this study, the controllers use a peculiar combination of abusive behaviour to exert control, the exploiters use various forms of abuse to exploit partners for their own financial needs, and the schemers systematically strategize to steal the women’s money. The despicable goal of the schemers is to shamelessly exploit the relationship and to wrongfully take women’s assets. Using this critical approach to analyse the cases relating to dowry abuse depicts that those who demand dowry are schemers who systematically and brazenly strategize to control not only the women’s assets but also the money that belongs to her natal family. As a controller, the abuser threatens the woman and inflicts senseless violence on her, if the dowry demands remain unfulfilled, he murders her or tortures her to compel her to commit suicide. As an exploiter, the abuser ruthlessly exploits the marital relationship to make arbitrary, irrational demands, to extract resources and wealth.

A critical analysis of several of the reported cases of dowry shows that it is not merely a custom consisting of a simple exchange of gifts; it is a predatory practice that consists of a broader form of violence, which is physical, economic, mental, emotional, and verbal, where the abuser intentionally exploits the element of emotional intimacy and the woman’s economic dependency in the relationship using his position of authority and while taking advantage of a woman’s situation of vulnerability. This acute form of economic abuse inextricably involves a perilous set of oppressive elements, including

1) compulsive persistence, coercive, arbitrary, and irrational demands that are made continuously over an incessant period starting from before the marriage, during the marriage, or even years after the marriage is performed;

2) pressurizing and coercing a woman and her natal family in various ways, including physical, emotional, or mental torture of a woman for consumer goods or cash or other material benefits,

3) killing a woman, treacherously murdering her, or burning her alive, or she is mentally tortured to such an extent that her circumstances become unbearable, she feels helpless, and she is compelled to commit suicide.

All these conspicuous elements may work together or singly, but the purpose is to compel women and their families to arrange for money, cash, valuables, or tangible goods. Arbitrary dowry demands, coercion, and violence are distinct elements that are not yet recognized legally in India. The legal system has grimly failed to recognize that the dowry demands or violence is not a one-time action, but it involves extorting money from the bride and her family by ruthlessly exploiting, torturing, subjugating, and oppressing women in the privacy of the home for years after marriage.

Making compulsive, arbitrary demands for the dowry from a bride is illegitimate, undesirable, immoral, and unethical, as are coercion and violence. The laws and policies on the dowry need to take these various complicated factors into account. The law has failed dismally to deter the attitude of entitlement among men who perhaps opine that it is their privilege that they can extort anything, anytime, from the family of the bride because of the marital relationship, ignoring the fact that marriage in no way entitles one to extract money or exploit women. The state hardly acts efficiently to curb this terrible crime; rather, the police and the courts, in several cases, as the bastion of male dominance, have propagated male chauvinism.

For instance, Mohinder Kaur, a teacher, set herself and her three children ablaze at her matrimonial home on 7.6.1983. Married seven to eight years ago, she was harassed for the dowry. She wrote a letter to the Deputy Superintendent of Police complaining of ill-treatment and persistently sought police protection. Her manipulative husband frustrated her frantic efforts to seek a transfer from the school where she was working. As per the prosecution, her mother-in-law and sister-in-law instigated her husband and conspired to brutally kill her by sprinkling alcohol, but their sinister plan misfired. Being fed up, Mohinder Kaur wrote a letter to her mother, sharing her unbearable agony, and committed suicide the next day. Her mother lodged an FIR. The trial court convicted her husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, but the High Court acquitted them on the ground that the prosecution could not prove that they aided and abetted her to commit suicide. The Supreme Court in State of Punjab v Iqbal Singh, while taking into account her ill-treatment and the atmosphere of terror created for her, restored the conviction of her husband but acquitted his sister. The legal system insisted on technicalities and the prosecution’s ability to produce convincing evidence, and not on the fact that Mohinder Kaur was continuously and brutally tortured to such an appalling extent that she could not see any other way around but to commit suicide along with her three children.

In Arvind Singh v. State of Bihar the daughter of Phulmati was horribly burned alive. The deceased, before her death, disclosed that her husband and other family members forcibly poured kerosene and set her on fire. The helpless girl was cruelly tortured because she was `ugly looking,’ and the pent-up demands for a dowry of Rs 10,000 and a gold ring could not be fulfilled. The apex court dwelled on the ghastly forms of burn injuries, the technicalities of a dying declaration, the nonexamination of the investigating officer and other evidence, and set aside the imprisonment under Sections 302 or 304B and 498A on the ground that no dowry demands were made prior to the date of the occurrence of the crime. Those who viciously murdered Phulmati’s daughter with impunity burned her, and then refused to take her charred body to the hospital were simply not deterred by the rule of law. The perpetrators somehow knew that the oppressive system upheld the mindset that burning women alive for the dowry is not considered a deadly crime and that they could effortlessly be set free. Perhaps, it is much easier to hopelessly entangle justice in the complicated web of technicalities, nitty gritty, and legal procedures in cases where women are victims.

Harjinder Kaur committed suicide on 7.2.1998 by ingesting aluminium phosphate because she was brutally tortured for not fulfilling the urgent demand for a motorcycle and a fridge (Sher Singh v State of Haryana). Her violent husband bitterly contested that she was hot-tempered,  desperately wanted him to shave his hair, and inevitably forced him to leave separately from his parents. The session judge convicted her husband and in-laws under Sections 304B and 498A IPC. The High Court, on appeal, acquitted all others except her husband on the technical ground that the prosecution calamitously failed to establish their role.

The Supreme Court acquitted the husband and noted, “What motivated or compelled her to take this extreme and horrific step will remain a mystery, as we are not satisfied that the prosecution has proved or even shown that she was treated with such cruelty, connected with dowry demands, as led her to commit suicide”. The court could not consider the fact that, for a motorcycle and a fridge, an unfortunate woman was barbarically tortured to such an extent that she committed suicide while she was pregnant.

The courts in several cases have emphasized the dereliction of the duty on the part of the prosecution or the negligence by the investigation officers to acquit the accused persons while overlooking the fact that justice is indignantly denied to the tragic victims because of the overall sloppiness by the law enforcement system in its entirety. And while doing so, the courts omit to perform an active role by directing the state to impart training to the officers and the staff to avoid any further such neglect on their part. The courts remain silent in situations where the rights of the victims are at stake.

Chinu Rani married Arjun Acharjee on 13.3.1994, and after their marriage, her husband and father-in-law severely tortured her physically and mentally for Rs 5000 in unpaid dowry out of the demand to pay Rs 20,000 (Nirode Ranjan Acharjee v State of Tripura). She wrote a letter to her father on 18.5.1994 requesting him to meet the pending demand. She tragically died on 30.6.1994. The post-mortem report noted that she died of insecticide poisoning. The trial court acquitted both the husband of the deceased and her father-in-law of the charges under Sections 304B and 306 IPC and convicted her husband only under Section 498A. On appeal, the High Court discarded the critical testimony of her parents, sister, and friend, where they testified that the deceased had told them that she had been subjected to harassment for nonpayment of the dowry, as hearsay evidence. The court also rejected the letter written by her as evidence, wilfully ignoring the dreadful agony the deceased underwent within a short period of her marriage. She died merely because her parents could not pay the money as promised at the time of marriage.

Mamta got married on 21.10.2001. She had a two-year-old daughter when she was found dead on 23.01.2005 (Rohit v State of Delhi). Her parents allege that her husband used to brutally torture her for the dowry and that they gave him cash many times. A day before she committed suicide, her husband sternly demanded Rs. 5000 in cash and a generator for his business. The case was registered under Section 304B and 34 IPC. However, the trial court acquitted the accused on the ground that the allegations were vague, general, and inconsistent, and no cruelty was committed by the accused. On appeal, the High Court maintained the acquittal on the ground that no proximate demand was made at the time when the deceased committed suicide while disbelieving the convincing testimonies of the witnesses. No one is held accountable for Mamta’s suicide.

Case after case demonstrates how crooked men have coerced, exploited, and murdered women for extorting the dowry. In all such cases, violent men have improperly used the devious mechanism of violence to pressurize, and torture women for months or years, and then murdered them for money or goods. Yet, the courts have upheld the patriarchal assumptions while acquitting the accused. Women have died in compelling circumstances. The testimony of witnesses and other material evidence indicates that women have been brutally murdered or were forcefully compelled to commit suicide because of unreasonable motives or coercive demands. Yet, the perpetrators of dowry violence are released on flimsy and technical grounds.

The courts frequently overlook the material evidence while disdainfully pointing out the faults of women as wives. The oppressive elements such as coercion, exploitation, extortion, or irrational, arbitrary demands are not taken into account while adjudicating the matters. Women are cruelly tortured and brutally murdered for the voracious ravenousness of soulless men, women are subjugated and oppressed by their families, and yet, are denied justice by the patriarchal state.

The United Nations Declaration on Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, clarifies that it is the duty of the state to ensure that the victims of crime should be treated with compassion, respect, and dignity and the judicial and administrative mechanisms should ensure that victims are not denied access to justice. However, in the situation of dowry violence, it appears that victims are deprived of justice and all the provisions and the norms mentioned in the said international instruments are flouted. The courts are seemingly unwilling to consider the varied elements of the triad of oppression deployed against women for the purpose of extracting dowry from them. The rights of women as human beings are still not upheld despite the promises and pledges made at the national or international level.

Excerpt from Dowry is a Serious Economic Violence: Rethinking Dowry Law in India, 2023, Amazon p. 104-106

Family courts uphold family ideologies, not gender justice

 

Family courts uphold family ideologies, not gender justice

During the 1980s, the demands were made by the women's movement to establish family courts, and the Family Court Act was enacted in 1984. The law provides for specialized forums to deal with ‘matrimonial conflicts’ and not domestic violence. These are designed to adjudicate matters such as divorce, custody suits, maintenance, restitution of conjugal rights, and connected issues. The goal is to make the courts accessible and less intimidating for women through dispensing with lawyers, legalistic jargon, strict rules of procedure, and standards of evidence.

These courts depicted mediation as an alternative to the patriarchy-inspired adversary system. This is preferred by many because of its reputation for providing a better hearing. Yet this system could not aid in reducing violence or enabling justice for women. Studies have shown that the family courts are not free from difficulties like backlogs, the exploitative commercial approach of lawyers, long, drawn-out battles, multiple court proceedings, and the insensitive approach of officials.

Family courts were created to avoid cumbersome litigation and replace it with samjhauta, or ‘brokering compromises’, to achieve efficiency and to shed the burden of the law. These courts mandatorily offer coercive persuasions to forcefully push women back to the violent families, to ‘adjust’, to ‘compromise’ to ‘preserve marriage’, even if it endangers their life and limb. An idea that is constantly being pushed is that the family is equipped to protect women while underplaying violence in it. Perhaps it is easier and more economical to compel women rather than question a man’s violent behavior. What is erroneously strengthened is the belief that women prefer to stay within abusive households, and therefore, through ‘forced compromises’, they are compelled to accept the violent situation without any guarantee of their safety or security. No options are offered outside the domain of the ‘sacrosanct’ family. The rhetoric of ‘counselling’, ‘mediation’ or ‘settlement’ reiterates the regressive family ideology rather than protecting women from violence or providing psycho-social support to victims. The focus on settling ‘family disputes’ could not deal with the serious violence women face. Family courts negate women’s experience of violence rather than providing justice. Theoretically, an adversary system is replaced to resolve matters expeditiously and harmoniously, but in reality, the criminal justice system is twisted to adjust to the tenor of the patriarchy.

The alternative dispute resolution system diluted the seriousness of domestic violence in various ways. The language itself deliberately lessens the gravity of an offense committed within the chardiwari of the household. The term ‘dispute’ entails that two parties are equal, as compared to the term ‘violence’ which implies an abuse of power. The concept of parity among parties on unequal footing is introduced silently by the slyness of the patriarchal forces. No attempts have been made to question the inequality in the relationship. This misconceived approach overlooks the fact that conciliation as a technique poses grave problems, as it overlooks the concept of power within the relation. It expands the state’s control over individual behavior within families, and more specifically, it is at times being used to cement the norms of a ‘good wife’, ‘good mother’, or a ‘bad woman’. Further, denial of anger and the command to forget the past and live in the present generate dissatisfaction and give rise to a feeling of injustice. The law has reinforced patriarchal oppression while discriminating against women.

Mediation avoids questions relating to power, property, and violence within a relationship. The use of coercion in a situation where two parties are not on par creates problems rather than resolving issues. This process of ‘coercive harmony’, as explained by Laura Nader, destroys rights by limiting discussion of the past. It prohibits anger, curtails freedom, eliminates choices, and removes protection of the law. It ignores a ‘victim’ status and compels a woman to compromise her health, life, or limb. Mediation within marriage does not address the structure of power located within the relationship and ignores the fact that parties in conflict in no way operate within the universe of ‘balanced bargaining equity’. It does not satisfy the survivor’s need for justice. Rather, it normalizes and trivializes the violence in everyday lives and compels survivors to curtail their emotions and hide the resentments that arise when they face abuse. During the process of mediation, a woman is vulnerable to threats and harassment and is under extreme stress and pressure, yet the reconciliation procedure does not consider these facts. Mediation overlooks legal entitlements and ends up denying justice to women who have less bargaining power and cannot negotiate.

Another choice offered is ‘settlement’, where a victim is left with no other alternative but to fend for herself and her children instead of a meager amount of money, if any, offered by the violent husband, or she may stay at her maika or remarry. Therefore, these so-called ‘women-friendly’ adjudication spaces failed to address the concerns of the victims of violence. In other words, these courts are ‘family-centric’ rather than ‘victim- or survivor-centric’.

This approach rejects the notion of making survivors economically self-sufficient or offering options to lend socio-economic support to victims. The patriarchal imagination failed to provide distributive justice or material relief and support to the abused wives through a single-window mechanism, despite the knowledge that a comprehensive rehabilitative package is essential to remedy the situation of violence. The bold notion of challenging male dominance while improving the status of women or providing innovative solutions aiding survivors has not been imagined as an alternative by the state or society.

For more details, see my book Women and Domestic Violence Law in India: A Quest for Justice, 2019, Routledge

p 59-60