Reel, not real: In Kasoor, Lisa Ray plays a lawyer who is acquitted after killing Aftab Shivdasani’s character in self-defence

On September 6, Ramadevi Reddy, a farmer’s wife from Andhra Pradesh, reportedly hacked off her husband’s head with a sickle, stuffed it in a plastic bag and carried it, blood dripping, to the police station, where she gave herself up. Not surprisingly, a murder case has been registered against her. But Ramadevi said that she killed Mohan Reddy, her husband, in self-defence.

Claiming that she took this extreme step after sustained mental and physical torture, the 32-year-old woman alleged that Mohan had forced her to go to Saudi Arabia to work as a farm labourer and domestic help so that he could pay off his debts. But when she came back, she found that he had spent all the money she had sent him on alcohol and also on another woman, whom he now wanted to marry. But, according to Ramadevi, what proved to be the last straw was that Mohan killed her parents while they were working in the field one afternoon because they objected to his second marriage.

The murder committed by Ramadevi is reminiscent of the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, made famous by the movie Provoked, starring Aishwarya Rai. In 1989, Ahluwalia, a Punjabi housewife in Britain, killed her husband by setting him on fire while he was asleep. Though given a life sentence for murder earlier, Ahluwalia was later acquitted by a British court when her long history of physical and mental torture came to light. In the case of Regina vs Ahluwalia (1992), it was argued that the murder was committed under severe and sustained provocation. In fact, the case became a historical precedent in British law, redefining the word “provocation” as applied to victims of domestic violence and recognising it as a valid line of argument for the establishment of a justifiable reason for the act.

But in Indian law, experts point out, the establishment of sustained provocation does not amount to much if the act of murder is committed without “sudden provocation”. That is, for a person to plead that the crime was an act of self-defence, he or she would have to prove that the provocation was sudden. Section 304 of the Indian Penal Code defines this as “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” — that in “which the offender, while deprived of the power of self-control by grave and sudden provocation, causes the death of the person who gave the provocation”.

Though he declines to discuss Ramadevi’s case, since it is “under investigation”, Calcutta High Court criminal lawyer Shekhar Basu says, “In Indian law, the right of private defence to life refers specifically to the right of a person to defend himself, herself or any other, under what they perceive to be an immediate threat to their or the other’s person or life.”

Calcutta-based Advocate Ashok Sharma, also declining to discuss the specifics of the Ramadevi case, says, “In Indian law, the kind of provocation alleged in the case of the farmer’s wife, even if proved, doesn’t have any bearing on a person being acquitted in the manner that Ahluwalia was acquitted.” He adds that Indian law recognises homicide in self-defence only when the provocation is “sudden” and the act of self-defence is “instantaneous” and not “pre-meditated”.

Advocate Jayanta Narayan Chatterjee of the Calcutta High Court agrees. “The plea of self-defence can only be heard if it can be established that at the time the crime was committed, the perpetrator was under an immediate physical threat from the victim. In that case, the defendant can invoke the less severe Section 304. But if in a court of law, it is proved that the person had sufficient time to contemplate alternatives other than murder, the defendant may have to face the harsher sections of the IPC, namely, Sections 299 and 302,” he says.

The difference between Sections 304 and 299/302 is in the severity of punishment. The punishment for 304 is stated in different subsections as “imprisonment for life or imprisonment for 10 years and fine”. Section 299, on the other hand, defines culpable homicide as that in “which the death is caused with the intention of causing death”. It carries a punishment, specified in Section 302, of “either death or imprisonment for life and/or fine”.

Activists and legal experts have long lobbied to expand the definition of self-defence to include provocation, which is not necessarily immediate. In August 2004, in Nagpur, a group of women stabbed to death notorious criminal Akku Yadav, a gang leader who faced 24 criminal charges, including murder and rape. According to these women, Yadav had unleashed a reign of terror, causing sustained fear amongst women in many parts of Nagpur. And so when he walked out of jail after serving only a very short sentence, the local women killed him in an act of “self-defence”, they claimed.

Though the police detained five women for the crime, they were all released after more than 400 women sat in protest in the courtroom. In fact, even the prominent lawyers of Nagpur got together and demanded that the women be treated not as defendants but as victims. Though they did not support the women taking the law into their hands, the lawyers implored the courts to consider the circumstances under which these women had committed the crime.

Of course, it is not just women who may benefit if the meaning of “provocation” as a justifiable reason for homicide is expanded to include “sustained provocation”. In a murder trial heard at a Howrah court last year, in which a sportsman was accused of killing his wife, the defence tried to establish a similar line of argument and said that the act was a result of prolonged mental torture. But seeing that the argument was not making any headway at all, the defence finally switched to “causing death for dowry” — the punishment for which is seven years. “My client had already served seven years in prison, so he was let off,” says the lawyer. “Had I continued trying to prove that the murder was an act of self-defence under sustained provocation, my client would possibly still be in jail, serving a life sentence,” he adds.