What do you do if you are a victim of domestic violence or sexual abuse? Do you have any legal teeth if you are in a live-in relationship? Additional Solicitor General of India Pinky Anand and social activist Rashmi Anand had answers to some burning questions like these at ‘Law And The Woman’, a chat organised recently by the Ladies Study Group and moderated by social entrepreneur Nandita Palchoudhuri at The Oberoi Grand. Excerpts...

Nandita Palchoudhuri: The media can sense what is happening in society and portrays it immediately. Why do we see law always playing catch up?

Pinky Anand: It’s like the chicken and the egg story — what comes first. Will you have the atrocities first and then the rectification? How will you have a rectification before the aberration actually happens? There’s a tandem arrangement between social change and law. Sometimes social change results in law being changed and vice versa.

Nandita: Do you think we need to be taught to recognise that sometimes we need legal recourse?

Pinky: A woman knows when a comment or a gesture is sexually explicit and when it’s innocuous. Law doesn’t only have to be a means to an end to punish somebody, law also has a message that this is wrong and this is right.

Nandita: There’s an extremely serious situation that Rashmi Anand faced — domestic violence. Could you share how it began and the way you dealt with it...

Rashmi: I got married in Delhi and went through a very violent and abusive marriage for 10 years. I did try and come back here once with injured ribs and a smashed face. But I didn’t get the support of my father and my brother who said there was no space for me to stay in the house. I went back. Things just got worse. I left only when my son stopped speaking completely and my daughter became very withdrawn because of the trauma, aged five and nine respectively. There wasn’t any financial support but I somehow managed to gather our lives.

Nandita: Does she (Rashmi) have, in law, a recourse to take her family to court for not supporting her and leaving her helpless in an arranged marriage?

Pinky: I’m afraid not. What can you sue them for? Certainly not for not providing emotional support. Incidentally, that has been the story of India. When women were beaten up by their husbands or ill-treated by their in-laws, they had no choice but to continue in the same rotten existence. Because they couldn’t go back to their parents who felt it was socially unacceptable for the girl to come back, or the brothers felt that they couldn’t share their space with a third person. Things are changing to some extent. Socially I find that parents are providing a lot more support than they did earlier.

I must say another thing about law — it’s an amazing tool for social change and to save yourself from torture. But law has a tendency to be used and misused.

Rashmi: I work with the law that wasn’t there to help me and came much later — the domestic violence law, ensuring women get their rights on an immediate basis, and it works. But even the mindset to use the law is something we need to work on. My mother wanted to help but wasn’t allowed to have a say. And the peculiar part is that the house we live in in Calcutta was in my mother’s name.

Nandita: If a woman lives with somebody over a period of time and then separates, does she have a right to inherit anything built together? Do you think the way forward is a lawful prenuptial arrangement?

Rashmi: Under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, it’s a right to live free of violence, and that covers live-in relationships as well. It also covers all women irrespective of community or age. It’s a very progressive law and if society is evolving, I feel the law has to move in that direction as well.

Pinky: It’s a very good Act because it provides a single window for relief. Also, nowhere in the world are prenuptial agreements accepted on the face value. Here you are deciding to get married and there you’re going to your lawyer to decide asset divisions. It’s a very complex issue.

In India we don’t have equitable distribution of assets between spouses, only a right to maintenance which is a monthly amount. The social significance of a woman to the household is not recognised and enumerated. A wife working all day bringing up the children doesn’t get rights on the economic parts of the marriage. That anomaly requires to be addressed, and you can understand there’s extreme opposition to it.

Rashmi: It was researched that women didn’t want to leave the house because they had no support outside. The domestic violence law gives you the right to live free of violence in the same property as your husband and seek maintenance.

Pinky: But there’s also a big problem on how a woman lives in a house where everyone hates you. It’s an irksome situation. Separations are crucial issues, and we’re asking the courts to provide the woman with a separate residence by making the husband pay for it.

Nandita: If a woman is allegedly raped, what steps should she take?

Pinky: You have a situation where you have been assaulted, and it happened behind closed doors.... So you never have any eyewitness to say that this had happened in front of them. And therefore you always have a different way of looking at sexual assault cases.

But what to do is very simple. You go to the police and lodge a complaint. Everybody thinks you register an FIR. You don’t register it, the police register it. It means First Information Report — the first time the police are told about what has happened. And that is only the beginning. Then the police go and investigate and arrest.

A woman says this has happened, the man says this didn’t happen. A woman says this happened deliberately, the man says the woman was drunk. These are the varying versions that come across in any kind of dispute of this nature... and the woman’s version should ordinarily be believed. There’s no medical test for many such activities, like pulling the hair. Medical test for rape requires cooperation.

The woman’s word has to be given full weightage. She has to have the courage. Whether she wants to do it or not want to do it, I personally think it’s a woman’s volition. The system should not be propelled to coerce a woman into doing something she doesn’t want to do. Sometimes they decide that every woman should come out and every woman should raise her voice. If she doesn’t have a desire, I shouldn’t pick her up and say let’s go and make a complaint. That is also something that we should be a little wary of.

Rashmi: The real change that we need is also within us. The first step to anything that we need to change is having total self-awareness, understanding and acceptance as women, and only then can we bring a change in our lives. Know which battles you want to fight and what is your own reality as a woman.

Text: Riddhima Khanna