THE DECEMBER ISSUE of the ‘Staying Alive’ series – a special series by The Leaflet which aims to create a “living archive” to mark twenty years of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (‘PWDVA’) – brings us critical recollections from three women who campaigned and lobbied for the law, on the ground with stakeholders and with legislators who ultimately pushed for the law. Ruth Manorama, who for decades has led several movements for Dalit women’s rights, and the rights of domestic workers, Anuradha Kapoor, the founder and director of Swayam, a Kolkata based feminist organisation that has remained committed to the issue of violence against women since 1995, and Sheba George, working particularly with women belonging to religious minority communities and Dalit women, share their insights, much of which remains crucial for the future of the Indian women’s movement.
Asmita Basu: You were all part of the delegation of representatives of women’s rights organisations that met Arjun Singh, then Union Minister of Human Resources and Development in 2004 to submit the bill drafted by the Lawyers Collective in consultation with women’s groups. The PWDVA thus institutionalised the praxis of the women’s movement. The kind of work that Swayam, NAWO and so many organisations were already doing is what got translated into the law.
So what was your work at the time, and why did you feel PWDVA was necessary, given that the movement had already secured Section 498A, 304B of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (‘IPC), the dowry prohibition amendments, the Family Courts Act, 1984 and other legal reforms?
Ruth Manorama: During the formation stage of the Act, I was the chair of the National Alliance of Women. NAWO brought together many smaller women’s rights organisations from across the country, and we were working closely with Indira Jaising and the Lawyers Collective at that time. We were also part of the delegation of women activists that submitted the Domestic Violence Bill to Arjun Singh in 2004.
My direct work on violence against women came through Women’s Voice, which is an organisation of women workers from the urban poor and the unorganised sector. We were engaged in community mobilisation, advocacy and relief work, and domestic violence was one of the important issues we kept encountering. Because of this, creating consciousness about domestic violence in the communities we worked with became a major part of our work. For me, the Act became important because it brought women’s human rights into the home.
Another motivation was figuring out how to get women to speak. Many women do not like to talk about the violence they face. So in Women’s Voice, we started a grievance cell every Thursday, and women would come. I felt this was the best way to educate communities, even when the law was still being drafted.
We also brought in lawyers who were conscious not just of women’s issues but also other social movements. They would explain the law in Tamil, Kannada and sometimes in Hindi or Urdu, because many Muslim women were part of the organisation. Women would come, and this became a way to hear their issues and slowly build awareness.
This was really the beginning for me.
Asmita Basu: What a powerful thing you said, Ruth, about how the campaign itself became a way of building capacity. Before I come to you, Anuradha, Sheba, would you like to follow up, because you were also part of NAWO at that time. SAHR WARU was part of NAWO, so I imagine your experiences may have been similar?
Sheba George: So actually my association with Indira Jaising has to do with 2002. So NAWO would be separate. We really came into this process through SAHR WARU. She was coming to Ahmedabad because of the 2002 cases, and that is how she realized the kind of work we were doing with Muslim women and Dalit women on the ground on violence against women.
I am trying to give that perspective from the grassroots, because we were all grassroots organisations. From the very beginning, we could see that domestic violence was everywhere. It was like an epidemic, like a disease. And like Ruth said, nobody prioritised violence at all. It was just accepted.
So for us, while we were developing things on the ground... for example, we had paralegal programs across maybe ten, fifteen slums. We had what we called Mahila Nyay Panchayats, an informal women’s ‘court’ that provided support to survivors of domestic violence, as well as facilitated settlements in family disputes. I think the only other person doing this in those years around 1985 was Action India. We were the only two in urban slums. And in our case, the constituency was a large number of Muslim women, and Dalit women living right next to them.
The idea was simple. In villages, whenever there was a crisis, they would say, “ham to panchayat ke paas jaate.” (“We go to the panchayat.”) So we said, why not create something similar here, in the urban context, where women can come together and support each other. But we wanted this to be connected to the secular legal system as well. Because otherwise they were going to their personal laws and whether it was domestic violence, marital rape, divorce, child custody, maintenance... everything was filtered through these patriarchal systems.
So we trained the same women who were part of the Mahila Nyay Panchayats in whatever gender-just laws existed then, like 498A, 125. But the complexity was always there and that is why aligning with this national movement to bring a more robust law made complete sense. A law that could look at more dimensions.
For me personally, my entry point was this question: how do we address the religio-cultural dimensions through which gender injustice is happening and how do we make sure gender justice comes first? So if a woman feels that secular law is giving her justice, she should have the option to choose that rather than her personal law or the panchayat decision.
And at that time, reforming personal laws, especially Muslim personal laws, was so contentious. On one side, Muslim women were embattled about community security and on the other side, their own need for gender justice. Both were clashing.
So this anxiety was always there. Will Muslim women be included? Will they be able to use this new law? I would keep asking Indira Jaising—can Muslim women use PWDVA or not? And she and the whole team were very attentive to these concerns.
So this is the buniyaad, the foundation, from which I entered the PWDVA campaign.
Asmita Basu: Anuradha, I want to come to you with the same question. Swayam and all the work you were doing in accompaniment and support, and how you got involved in the campaign. Why did you feel this law was needed?
Anuradha Kapoor: For us it was a little different. Swayam actually began with addressing violence against women as the core issue. That was our starting point. At that time, there wasn’t a single organisation in the city where a woman could go and find all the support she needed in one place. So when Swayam started, the idea was to respond to violence against women in a holistic manner, within a single space, so that women wouldn't have to run from pillar to post for help. We soon found that a majority of the women came to us for support to deal with domestic violence revealing just how pervasive and normalized it was. In response, Swayam built an integrated model of support—combining counselling, legal intervention, and economic support—aimed not only at crisis response but at enabling women to reclaim autonomy and stand on their own feet.
Because we were working directly with survivors, it became clear very quickly that the existing laws, like 498A or the dowry laws, were failing to address the realities of what women were actually facing.
Domestic violence is very complicated. It is complex and you cannot address it only through criminal law. Most women did not want to go to the criminal system. They would say, “I do not want to put my husband, the father of my children, behind bars.” Their concerns were very practical. “If he goes to jail, how will I eat? Where will I live? How will my children go to school?” What they wanted was very simple. They wanted the violence to stop. They wanted a roof over their head. They wanted maintenance so they could look after their children.
And the criminal laws did not give these remedies. And even the civil laws that existed at the time were scattered. Maintenance in one court. Custody in another. No right to residence. No protection order. No compensation. Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 was also not helpful because at that time it provided about a maximum of 500 rupees a month. Women were being thrown out of their houses with children and no money and were expected to survive.
So the PWDVA came at exactly the right time. It responded to what women said they actually needed. It was coming from the ground, from the realities of women’s lives. By then Swayam had been around for about five years, and we had a lot of understanding of where the problems lay.
We were also working with women across communities, Hindu women and Muslim women. So if a woman wanted to override her personal laws and seek justice through a secular law, she could do that. That was very important for us.
That is how we got involved in the campaign. We felt the law was addressing everything we were struggling with on a daily basis. And within the campaign too, we raised many issues. In the first drafts that the Lawyers Collective came up with, there were many responses from the groups.
We were not a community-based organisation in the way others were. We were working with individual survivors. But what we did was bring together all the organisations in West Bengal that were working on domestic violence. We brought together women’s rights organisations, lawyers, the Women’s Commission, academics. We created spaces where people who were working with survivors could discuss issues, look at the Lawyers Collective drafts, and give inputs based on their practical experience. Most importantly, we worked with survivors and brought their lived experiences to the table.
That is where we came from.
Asmita Basu: Thanks, Anuradha. That actually brings me to my next set of questions, which is about the consultations. I want to take us back to that period. NAWO did a lot of the consultations as well and brought together many groups, and the very first consultation happened in Calcutta. So just take us back to those days of the consultations. Who was there, what was happening, what was being discussed?
Anuradha Kapoor: The consultations were really important. They happened in academic spaces, with feminist groups, women’s groups, and with the Women’s Commission. The process had actually begun in 1999, when the Lawyers Collective sent us the first draft. We discussed it and came up with several recommendations.
One of our main concerns was the introduction of Protection Officers. We felt this would simply add another layer of bureaucracy. Women would first have to go to a Protection Officer, and our experience with government officials working with women was that they were often deeply patriarchal. So the fear that women would face yet another hurdle was there.
The second major issue was implementation. We knew from experience that having a law is not enough if it is not time-bound and enforceable. We wanted the law to specify exactly how implementation would work.
Another important aspect about the Lawyers Collective draft was that it included all women. Usually, when we talk about domestic violence, we automatically think of marital abuse, but the draft also recognised that unmarried women could also experience domestic violence.
However, one issue that we were deeply concerned about was that in cases of marital abuse, the original Bill was drafted in a way that allowed provisions to be misused by sisters-in-law or mothers-in-law to file cases against the woman herself. We argued that this had to be stopped, because the other side is always better resourced, better prepared and more powerful than the survivor. Ultimately, a clause was included to prevent this. However, the courts have now removed it and today we see exactly what we had feared – the courts are full of cases of mothers-in-law versus daughters-in-law, sister-in-law versus daughter-in-law. It has become the khichadi we had anticipated.
One more point was that the draft listed the child as an aggrieved person. We said if the child is an aggrieved person, fathers could use the child against the mother by influencing or pressurising them. There were also concerns about orders restricting a mother or her relatives from entering portions of the house where the child lived, that would create further harm and injustice.
We also raised the issue of the right to residence of the second wife. If the first wife is already residing in the house and the second wife also has a right to reside, how would that play out? There was the question of the Domestic Incident Report. Did we really need a DIR each time? Could it be only if the woman wants it. Then there were the duties of the central and state governments. At that point, specific duties of shelter homes, medical facilities, legal aid… none of that was mentioned. We asked for that to be included.
There were also concerns about the role of service providers. They are supposed to act in the woman’s best interest, but if the woman later says they did not, how will accountability work? These were some of the concerns that came up.
Sheba George: Thanks so much, Anu. This is really comprehensive. I just remember all the times when we had to go run.
Asmita Basu: Ruth ma’am, would you want to come in on the consultations? Who was there, what was happening, what were you all discussing? If you could tell us about that.
Ruth Manorama: See, I would never enter into any law or legislation formation unless I was convinced that it would actually give relief to women who are aggrieved. There are already so many laws. So what is the importance of PWDVA? This was the question with which I went into the consultations.
NAWO organised consultations in Odisha, Kolkata, Bangalore, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, and the North Indian belt was also covered. In Calcutta we held one with NAWO Kolkata. In Bangalore, NAWO-Bangalore organised it.
We invited many people. To convince others, we would say Indira Jaising and Lawyers Collective are bringing a law that looks at the real needs of women. But everybody around us would say “Aiyo! There are enough legal provisions already to protect women. Why another law?” Even today, this morning, I called one lawyer friend of mine and asked him whether the domestic violence law is useful or not. He told me women take advantage of it. I said women have always been in a disadvantaged position, even today. If this law gives more advantage to women, why not. Every law is so patriarchal and has always benefited men and their parties.
They told me wherever you work, Ruth, you create conflicts. At that time, they were saying this law will break families, as if all families are harmonious. My understanding of human rights is very strong. I told them that the PWDVA is the mother of all laws to protect women’s human rights at home. It does not only address physical abuse. It gives protection, monetary relief, residence relief, compensation, custody rights.
We organised consultations with advocates. We told them we want relief within a month. We brought activists, community women, retired judges, people from legal aid authorities. A very comprehensive group attended these meetings.
My friend Sharda Sathe, who is very close to Indira Jaising, conducted meetings in Maharashtra. And we made money available for groups to organise these consultations and training programmes.
For me, the political side of the law was very important. Not only access to justice but also supportive services. Because only going to court is not enough. Since we were already working with women, we knew which organisations provided support. We brought them into the seminars too.
Earlier, law could not enter the home. With the PWDVA, you could address the private actor also. This is also the objective of the United Nations–Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (‘CEDAW’). CEDAW does not only address the state but also the private realm.
In 2000, the CEDAW Committee gave a strong recommendation to the Government of India to formulate a law on domestic violence. The committee said many countries like Malaysia and Singapore had PWDVA-like laws, so why not India? If India took it up then many South Asian countries would follow.
So, one action linked with another action. It was a chain from the campaign level to the formation level. We were involved throughout. The political climate was mixed. Good in terms of our needs, but negative from common people and legal professionals. Even though it's a civil law, and it's going to provide relief to the women, men still think you are terrorizing them.
This is how we carried on the campaign with people all around the country. We had such a good network spread across.
Asmita Basu: I will come to Sheba now. For you, especially working at the intersection of community, religion and violence, do you think the law as it finally emerged reflected your concerns? And what do you think got left out?
Sheba George: In Gujarat organisations like Jyotisangh, Stri Kelvani Uttejak Mandal, SEWA and AWAG had done a lot of work on violence against women. Ila Ben Pathak was there then. These Gujarat groups were actively consulted and were very much part of the discussions.
Majlis had a different point of view at that time about this kind of law. And there were concerns around restraining orders. If a woman is facing violence and is fearful, how will she continue to live in the same house? Because earlier, the method here was shifting women to shelter homes. So how would this new framework actually work on the ground? Their point of difference was that a separate law was not required because civil injunctions were available. However, this argument can be rebutted: the civil remedies under the Civil Procedure Code, 1908 were inadequate. There was no comprehensive definition of domestic violence and no recognition of the right to reside.
And in our discussions with Muslim women, one thing became very clear: they themselves do not necessarily want to use personal law. This is my experience. When it comes to violence, divorce, child custody, all of these issues, Muslim women in Gujarat were already very comfortable going to court. They would confidently say, “498A toh rakho… do din jaake police me do maar khayega na toh…” (“Keep 498A… when he will go to the police station and face even a couple of days of rough treatment, he will fall in line.”) I think it comes from the idea that marriage is regarded as a contract under Sharia Law. In Gujarat, when we would speak to advocates, they would say Muslim women under Section 125 are getting maintenance.
Asmita Basu: In some sense the PWDVA is a uniform civil code, because anyone can use it, and it recognises a right to reside for all women irrespective of religion.
Sheba George: Yes, exactly.
Asmita Basu: So I want to move to the next set of questions, and I’m going to ask one very broad one. Suppose this entire process were to happen today. How would you do it?
Anuradha Kapoor: For me, the big difference if this process happened today would be implementation. Our fears about implementation were not unfounded. It is a good law. The problem is with how it has been implemented, and also how the courts have perceived the law.
A major issue is that the law was framed as a protective law, not a preventive law. Because it was not framed as a preventive law, the prevention part of domestic violence was left out. The Lawyers Collective’s draft also included a provision for the appointment of a Rapporteur to monitor incidents of domestic violence and institutional responses to them. Monitoring, public campaigns and other interventions have fallen by the wayside.
Even in our discussions with the government back then, we argued that it should be framed as a preventive not a protective law because the goal was that you do not want violence to happen in the first place. So if I were drafting it today, I would still stick to our major points of disagreement, all of which centred around how the law would be implemented.
One of the main issues was the wording in the law. It did not say the court must pass an order within a certain time. It said the court will endeavour to have the first hearing within 3 days and pass the order within 60 days of receipt of the application. The dilution was the use of the term “may” instead of “shall” in several operative provisions. So there was leeway and so the time frame is just not being followed. And somehow judges seem to feel that women can live on ‘love and fresh air’. So if we were doing it now, we would insist on “must” and not “shall” so that women do not have to wait indefinitely for an order or constantly have to go back to court for execution.
The law has also been significantly watered down in relation to marital family violence , largely through judicial interpretation. It has become far more diluted and complicated over time. For example, the definition of respondent has been expanded to include women in the marital home to be respondents which means that now when a daughter-in-law files a case, the mother-in-law can file a counter-case. The fear we had right at the beginning, has come to reality. Also, we need to think more carefully about how to address natal family violence and marital violence as two distinct issues. I still do not have a clear answer of how to do this, but these are critical concerns that we need to flag.
Another suggestion we had made even then, which never found its way into the law, was the question of state responsibility in ensuring that maintenance is received by women in a timely manner. Not every woman can survive when maintenance is not being paid to her. If the state were to step in by paying the amount to the woman first and then recovering it from the respondent, it could do it more effectively. But for an individual woman to recover it, is a real struggle. So, if we were redrafting the law , I would rethink implementation and insist on mechanisms like direct deduction of the salary by the employer.
The second thing is service provision. There are now one-stop crisis centres, which came out of the demands we raised. The PWDVA had service providers built into it but the quality, availability and access to those services should have been clearly mentioned.
The third thing is monitoring the law. When the Lawyers Collective was doing it, for the first five years we had information about what was happening. After that it all fell by the wayside. There should have been a provision in the law for state-level monitoring and for that information to be made public.
Some issues remain unresolved, like the status or entitlements of the second wife under the PWDVA. How do you decide who gets what? That remains complicated. And the issue of the child being influenced against the mother is still unresolved.
Asmita Basu: Thanks. Ruth ma’am, I want to come to you. Twenty years on, taking into account the fact that the criminal justice system has not really improved since we started the campaign, what would you do differently?
Ruth Manorama: I think the PWDVA addresses all women. It does not prevent Dalit women or Muslim women from making a claim under it. So in that sense, caste and religious issues are also embedded in it.
Dalit women who face caste violence and violence in the private realm, from their husbands, can go to court. Women have that knowledge now. They are no longer silent. They do not think, my husband is a Dalit so I will not go. It is not like that. I have seen many cases from the slum communities where Dalit women have gone to court against their husbands and got relief. They are very strong in the movement. Dalit women’s groups are now addressing violence at home by using this law.
Secondly, Dalit women who marry into dominant‐caste families often face intensified abuse. Caste prejudice layers onto patriarchal control. A Dalit colleague endured such casteist violence from her in-laws. I urged her to record these harms and explore relief by invoking the PWDVA alongside the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955. She refused, fearing that naming caste would prejudice the court in the absence of precedent.
When I filed an affidavit on marital rape before the Supreme Court, I was asked to address this specific vulnerability of Dalit women in dominant‐caste households.
If you ask me how I would draw the law today, I would say women from marginalised communities, especially Dalit women, should have relief on account of multiple axes of discrimination. Especially when men have abused her and she says, "I do not want to have sexual intercourse with you,” and still she is raped many times. That is marital rape. How do you treat that under the law?
Anuradha Kapoor: The PWDVA is the only place where we can address sexual violence within marriage as the definition of domestic violence includes sexual violence.
Asmita Basu: Yes, it is covered. It is a civil wrong, not a criminal offence.
Ruth Manorama: We need to look at Dalit women because of caste, and also at trans people, because of sex or gender. Lesbian women as well. If the violence happens in their families or in the communities where they live, what happens to them.
Anuradha Kapoor: One more issue is disability. The specific issues women with disabilities face should have been brought in much more explicitly. Many women do not even realise that they can use this law because disability is not mentioned, lesbian or queer women are not mentioned, and natal family violence is not specifically mentioned.
If we were to redraft the law, there would need to be specific sections addressing these issues.
Ruth Manorama: And I want to reiterate the implementation part. Since we don’t have enough judges and our courts are overloaded, immediate relief and disposal of cases has not happened.
Maybe these cases should be dealt with by family courts or a separate court, with immediate relief and disposal. With such special disposal mechanisms for the PWDVA, survivors may feel less vulnerable while traversing through court procedures.
Another issue is that judicial remedies can sometimes be so narrow that the full range of remedies are not being provided to the survivors. I was reading a verdict recently where the survivor was not given any relief such as compensation, and she was not allowed to live in the same residence. So how judges interpret, and how we could educate judges is also an issue.
Sheba George: My sense is that the PWDVA is not addressing the central issues faced by women. We have seen that there is a diversion from Section 498A. When it comes to divorce, maintenance, compensation (it may take nine to ten months but the survivor gets a decent amount of money) or child custody, the PWDVA is being used more commonly.
However, when it comes to cases where there is grave violence, especially when you are looking at underprivileged homes, or where there is a hostile environment, we are not seeing remedies like residence or protection orders being given out.
We have seen that what the advocates, the service provider or the Protection Officer is more focussed on, nowadays, is to ensure that the survivor gets a good compensation, maintenance or custody.
Further, I find it inappropriate that judges across different states are interpreting the law and giving judgments in such diverse ways that it impacts the progress achieved through certain judgments in certain states. This is undermining an uniform interpretation of reliefs.
Ruth Manorama: This should not be happening since PWDVA is a standardised central law.
Sheba George: I feel that the PWDVA fails to directly address the core issue of violence against women. Judges may give out residence orders, which are weak. If the survivor can manage with just that, well and good. But it does not address the central issue.
Lastly, the PWDVA is an all inclusive law. While violence faced by women may of different natures, relating, for instance, to caste or religion, especially when there is an inter-religion, or intercaste marriage dynamic, I feel that the PWDVA should remain a general law so that it can be most viable. The nature of violence where caste or religion is involved is so specific, so different, that we then have to redraft the law very differently.
I feel the law should remain like this, as it is quite inclusive. I have seen many women with disabilities rely on the law as well. However, my disappointment remains with the fact that the law is not addressing violence against women.
Asmita Basu: So you’re saying that it is not addressing the issue of violence?
Anuradha Kapoor: I don't agree. I think it does. You are saying that the criminality of the issue is not addressed by the law. However, the law was not meant to address the criminality anyway.
Sheba George: Earlier, Section 498A used to address that issue. The perpetrator would be simply put in jail. Now the woman first goes to the Mahila Police Station, which then guides her to a service provider. The police resist registering the cases under Section 498A. So all the cases are registered under the PWDVA.
The service provider then sits down with her, prepares the DIR, and then takes her to the Protection Officer. All of this takes time. In the meantime, the violence she is facing at home is not getting addressed. The man is not getting arrested. There’s no prevention, no curtailing, no stopping of that violence. The immediate protection that the criminal law offered is largely lost, leaving women vulnerable.
Anuradha Kapoor: But Sheba, is this true with all the cases? It’s not like cases under Section 498A are not being registered at all. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau is suggesting that the registration of Section 498A cases is on the rise!*
Sheba George: Our cases, and experience from the ground is suggesting that Section 498A cases are not being registered.
We are seeing that Mahila Police Stations in Gujarat are steering survivors away from registering under Section 498A and nudging them towards service providers and the procedure under the PWDVA, which is slower and involves a long chain of referrals including POs, SPs and such.
Anuradha Kapoor: What you are saying is very true, the police do tend to nudge women to use PWDVA. Earlier, when survivors did not have a choice, they simply registered a case under Section 498A.
Sheba George: We need to look at the issue more holistically. If the woman is facing extreme violence, how is she managing? Is she going to a relative? Is she moving out? Because once a domestic violence case is registered, the violence can increase. This is because the protection or residence order does not come immediately.
Anuradha Kapoor: The order not coming immediately is the biggest problem.
Sheba George: In the cases where the woman is coming into this with the clarity that she wants to separate, the law is working more effectively in her favour. Another point is that Muslim women are often able to access divorce and remarriage much more easily (this is because under Muslim law, marriages are a contract and not a sacrament as under Hindu law).
Asmita Basu: It is a point of concern if Section 498A cases are indeed being diverted. Anu and Ruth, maybe you can testify to this: We did think of this issue, and we had thought of both PWDVA and Section 498A working together in simultaneous proceedings through multiple avenues. However, this conversation shows that many questions remain open, and the consultations need to be organised again.
Ruth Manorama: We have a client who is from Tamil Nadu and moved to Bengaluru. She had filed for maintenance in Tamil Nadu, and had also filed a case under the PWDVA. If the survivor is smart and the lawyers are smart, nobody is preventing the use of Section 498A. She is from a middle-class background and she was able to give the fees. She got the maintenance there and she’s also fighting a case.
Sheba George: Let us not talk from only our limited experiences. Let us discuss from the perspective of a larger audience. Millions of women in the country go to the police station only when they feel that they cannot deal with the violence any more. When they have reached the last row they go to the Mahila Police Station. And that is where they are being guided towards aid. You very well know how these helplines operate. They send the women back to their homes!
On the other side of these helplines are young girls who have no experience or knowledge, except some cursory training on the law. They don’t know how to do counselling.
Anuradha Kapoor: My own experience has been that even twenty years ago, getting a case registered under Section 498A was difficult. Today, it is even more so. I remember that back then when women wanted to register a case, the police would not register the case until we went to the police station to intervene. It is still the same today. The movement needs to put its efforts into addressing systemic barriers. Both then and now, it has been difficult to register 498A cases. The difference, now, is that there is also huge widespread discourse that 498A is being misused. I remember that in 2011, a Parliamentary Committee had noted that Section 498A was being misused. It is happening today as well. The problem is that we, as the women’s movement, have not been able to produce a study that shows the lack of use of 498A – rather than its alleged misuse– as something that is happening widely across the country.
Sheba George: And it’s the police who are resisting using it.
Anuradha Kapoor: We have to hold them accountable. I don’t think it’s enough to just assert that this is the law and you must follow it.
Over time, judges have made unsubstantiated observations regarding how thousands of women are misusing 498A, without showing any data. Where we need to do our due diligence is by actually demonstrating and talking about how this so-called ‘misuse’ does not, in fact, happen.
Does this mean, though, that women are not using Section 498A? I think that is a separate inquiry, and I don’t think that the use of the PWDVA should in any way impede the registration of 498A cases.
Sheba George: Section 498A was already being underutilised. Now, the police have this great excuse of it being ‘misused’ to impede the registration of 498A cases.
Asmita Basu: My experience has been that earlier if a survivor approaches under 498A, she would be taken to the Family Counselling Centres, which were part of the police stations. Now, they are obviously being directed to the PWDVA mechanism. But we do not have enough data to suggest whether 498A cases registration has increased or fallen.
Ruth Manorama: As we talk about 498A and the PWDVA, let’s not forget the reality that violence against women has increased now since the 1990s and 2000s. We are still running from pillar to post, seeking the best relief. The survivors have to make the choice of what they want in life. Like them, we are also put through this experimental process.
There is no single experience. Different women in different situations are getting different types of reliefs from different places—some short term, some long term. But despite our disagreements, we can all agree that domestic violence against women has increased over these years.
Anuradha Kapoor: I think all of us have agreed that implementation of the law has let us down. The same recommendations that we made twenty five, thirty years ago, when I started Swayam, are still being made today. The actual implementation of those recommendations has remained static. Small changes are made every now and then to keep us quiet, but there is no change of the substantive kind that is required. As a movement, we have not been able to shift the discourse from “498A is being misused” to “498A is not being used.” There was a Committee on Petitions in Rajya Sabha which had stated, in 2011, that Section 498A is being misused. At that time, I had made a presentation before them, citing government data to show that 498A, in fact, was not being used. I think we need a national level study on the use and lack of use of Section 498A.
Sheba George: I have noticed that the police are resistant to registering under Section 498A and are preferring to go through the PWDVA. I often insist before them to register under Section 498A, since if we wanted the PWDVA process we would have gone to the courts and not to them. They often explain that their apprehension is that domestic violence cases are often withdrawn, which is why they are reluctant to use Section 498A. So I believe that if Section 498A is converted into a compoundable offence, this would inspire the police to register more cases under the provision.
Anuradha Kapoor: Adding on to this, the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, 2023, actually provides discretionary power to the police that in cases of Section 498A, or any offence which prescribes less than seven years of punishment, they can do a preliminary investigation to decide whether they want to file a case or not. This, also, is undermining the registration of cases under Section 498A.
Sheba George: This is all concerning because the survivor is going to the police at the very last stage. When she goes to the police station, the entire neighbourhood gets to learn about this. So back at home she faces an increased threat of violence.
Asmita Basu: How do you hope future generations understand the story of the PWDVA and the role of women’s movement in it? Are there any lessons from your participation in the campaigning for the PWDVA that would be useful for organising in today’s time?
Sheba George: From my experience of conducting POSH workshops across various institutions, I have learned that there is a lack of awareness among young people, spanning from slums and villages to elite institutions.
Institutions also have abdicated their responsibilities of dispersing information. It is increasingly difficult to get adolescent groups to sit down and understand various legal mechanisms and the legal processes available to them.
Sheba George: Earlier, through our campaigns, engagements and advocacy with various institutions, we were able to bring forth various discussions on women’s rights in the public domain. Today, contrary to that, the dominant conversation has shifted to the misunderstanding that women are over-empowered, and are misusing laws. We need to recapture that conversation to re-emphasise that these precautions, preventions and protective measures are here to bring greater equality for women.
Anuradha Kapoor: The PWDVA campaigning was truly expansive and inclusive. It was spread from the north to south, east to west, bringing together women’s organisations, feminist groups, and diverse stakeholders. It ensured that the opinion of women on the ground as well as the organisations working at the top were considered. It was a very connected, very physical movement.
Nowadays, we see that a lot of mobilising is done online, and there is not enough bringing together of people. Recently, when we did discussions around Beijing+30 (a global initiative by the UN to assess progress, address challenges, and recommit to achieving gender equality and women's empowerment worldwide), there were various consultations that happened in different parts of the country. It was good to be able to meet people, talk to them and discuss various issues. Organising offline is important so that you can connect a little bit, and so that the coming together of people is more organic and not led by a single person.
Lawyers Collective may have ultimately come out with the draft but it was a collective effort, where each of us contributed with a lot of back and forth discussions and many disagreements. Back then decisions such as who would go to a platform to represent the group’s concern happened with a lot more coordination.
In today’s political environment, it is impossible to discuss and debate in that same manner. We were fortunate that the political environment at that time was conducive to how we discussed issues.
We raised so many issues with the government, and ultimately eighty percent of the issues we raised were successfully resolved. When we used to go and speak with Parliamentarians to seek to understand who would support our cause, we would find that even the other side of the political spectrum listened to us. I am sure that even within today’s political structure, there will be people willing to listen to our argument. But we seem to have given up on trying to do that totally. We need to look at allies within the system.
In terms of learning how to lobby for a law and get it pushed at the central level, Lawyers Collective provided critical learning. It is a constant battle and a fight, and you have to be prepared for the long run.
Ruth Manorama: The movement needs to be ever dynamic and growing according to the changing context. Unfortunately, even today, people over the ages of sixty and seventy still lead the movement. And I think there should be an induction of new faces, young people. If all of us had not gotten the opportunity to start actively contributing to the movement forty years ago when we were young, things would have been very different today. The times are also changing. Today, the world is becoming increasingly fundamentalist, even against women. Law is only one among various tools through which to organise and assert. There are the tools of social and political assertion also. In today’s hostile context, it is really important for us to critically analyse and look back at what the law has been able to achieve.
Sensiting the younger generations about the law, and the clarity on which the PWDVA was built and brought in is very important. The younger generation needs to understand that the PWDVA is meant to add to and not replace any existing legal remedies.
Young people are critical to the future of the movement. Nowadays, many younger women are saying that they do not want to get married at all - they see men as perpetrators and enemies of women. The reason they are saying this is because they see violence against women in such a widespread manner. Girls are leaving their marital homes on the fifth, tenth or eleventh day. I believe that sensitising young people about our laws, our socio-economic realities is very important.
I believe that legal awareness needs to be a part of our school curricula particularly because young boys need to be able to learn what constitutes unacceptable behaviour, what constitutes criminal behaviour and what is against the law.
The other issue is intersectionality. I feel that if we were to draft the PWDVA today, we could not do it without incorporating intersectionality. We know that the PWDVA addresses all women, including for instance, women with disabilities. But we must acknowledge that a woman with disability will face unique challenges in terms of accessibility when she goes to the Court. The law does not specifically mention that there must be someone in court to help her. So we need to have discussions on the specific issues women with different marginalities may face.
Asmita Basu: Thank you so much for your time.
Anuradha Kapoor: It was nice to actually go back. I had forgotten about all the things that we had done. As I was going through the documents, I realised that we had met so many people, gone to so many places, done so many things.
Ruth Manorama: I remember we met Arun Jaitley.
Anuradha Kapoor: We met the HRD Minister at the time Arjun Singh who chaired the Parliament Standing Committee.
Ruth Manorama: Arun Jaitley came to a large meeting at the India International Center.
We met Sumitra Mahajan (former Speaker of the Lok Sabha). We also met Margaret Alva, who was former Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions and Parliamentary Affairs. We were also supposed to meet Sonia Gandhi but I believe she was busy in Parliament at that time.
Asmita Basu: It was wonderful to hear about not just the content of the law, but also about these interactions and experiences.
Note: In its fact-check, The Leaflet found that a review of the NCRB records shows fluctuations rather than a consistent upward trend in reported and registered cases over the years. The figures on cases registered under Section 498A from 2013-23 are set out below. 2013- 1,18,866 2014- 1,22,877 2015- 1,13,403 2016- 1,10,378 2017- 1,04,551 2018- 1,03,272 2019- 1,25,298 2020- 1,11,549 2021- 1,36,234 2022- 1,40,019 2023- 1,33,676