It becomes necessary at times to state the obvious. The Alipore court, sitting over a recent divorce proceeding, has done precisely that. The wife has been ordered to pay alimony to her unemployed and ill husband, and even to bear a part of his legal expenses. Equality before the law is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution, and it pertains to all citizens of India, irrespective of gender. The principle is written into the divorce laws of the country as well, although they have been mostly used on behalf of women and for the safeguard of their rights. If the fight over the woman’s right to maintenance has occupied such a disproportionate amount of the courts’ time as compared to that of the man, it is a reflection of some invincible legal and social realities. The judiciary of independent India has had to acknowledge and deal with women as making up a substantial section of the dispossessed. It has also had to rectify some of the biases inherent in laws made in pre-colonial and colonial times, when women were in a more disadvantageous position both socially and economically. The contending claims of the personal laws have not made the task any easy for the courts. In spite of the roadblocks, however, the judiciary has made major strides in giving women their due. Alimony is now an unassailable right of the woman, at the end of a formal marriage or an informal live-in relationship or even bigamy, and irrespective of the community she belongs to. The amount is no longer dictated by the strict prescriptions of law, but by a consideration of living standards. The only thing that needs to be reiterated is that if the underprivileged woman deserves to be assured of her rights, so does the underprivileged man in an unequal relationship. And that is where the significance of the Alipore court judgment rests.

This is not the first time that gender equality has been stressed on in divorce cases. The judiciary has done this before in Hyderabad in 2002 and Lucknow in 2005. But the application of law is often problematized by circumstances, particularly by chances of its misuse, as several legal provisions concerning dowry and domestic violence are prone to in the hands of their beneficiaries. Divorce laws too are not immune to such pitfalls. Despite court orders, alimonies are denied or stopped. Perhaps there is a need to emphasize on the basic principles of justice, the spirit of the law as well as on the strict compliance of legal orders.