The Supreme Court of India says, “But by misuse of the
provision (IPC 498a - Dowry and Cruelty Law) a new legal
terrorism can be unleashed. The provision is intended
to be used a shield and not an assassin’s weapon”. Laws originally
meant to protect from the dowry menace are being misused by urban
ill-educated, unscrupulous women and their families as “an assassin’s
weapon” .
There is a rapidly accelerating social evil in Indian families, namely the
misuse of the Dowry and Cruelty laws (Criminal Laws), which were
originally meant to act “as a shield” for the protection of harassed
women. Nowadays, the educated urban Indian women have turned the
tables. They have discovered several loopholes in the existing Indian
judicial system and are using the dowry laws to harass all or most of the
husband’s family that includes mothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, elderly
grandparents, disabled individuals and even very young children.
We are not talking about the dowry deaths or physical injury cases
but about dowry harassment cases that require no evidence and can
be filed just based on a single-sentence complaint by the wife. With an
estimated 40,000 such accusations per year and an average of 5 members
of the husband’s family implicated in each of these 498a cases, about
200,000 people are directly affected by these false accusations. The
number of such cases is increasing by about 20% every year as there is a
lot of money to be made by the divorce industry. This poorly formulated
law is inviting unscrupulous people to file false cases, and causing the
imprisonment of innocent people without investigation. These innocent
people undergo stigmatization and hardship even before a trial in the
court of law which leads to emotional, physical and financial strain. Some
of the falsely accused have committed suicide after being jailed, unable to
bear the social consequences.
Despite the recommendations of the Supreme Court of India and Justice
Malimath Committee that the legislative arm should modify the laws such
that the innocent are protected, the suggested amendment to the law
has been largely ignored. Unconstrained, this social evil is threating the
foundaton of the Indian Family system.
We are a large group of several thousand families unwilling to succumb to
Legal Terrorism, with a belief that truth shall prevail.
