LAST OCTOBER, commemorating twenty years of the enactment of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 ('PWDVA'), we kickstarted a special year-long series intended as a ‘living archive’ of the law, one that reflected on not only those who shaped it, but also the implementers. Activists and lawyers who have mechanised, litigated and animated the legislation have seen not only what the PWDVA changed in the legal regime surrounding protection of women, but also who benefitted from it, under what circumstances, and perhaps, most valuably, what aspects of it remained under-explored. Is there, for instance, a more creative way in which we can look at the roles of Protection Officers and institutions like Mahila Panchayats moving forward?
This month, advocate Jawahar Raja, renowned for his extensive work in criminal law, shares reflections on his long-standing experience of undertaking cases on domestic violence and support for women from marginalized communities since 2001.
Asmita Basu: When and how did you start working on cases relating to domestic violence?
Jawahar Raja: I started doing cases for survivors of domestic violence from around 2001 for activists from an organisation called ‘Action India’. These activists were part of an extensive network of Mahila Panchayats working in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies and resettlement colonies. The Mahila Panchayats were senior women from these unauthorised and resettlement colonies attempting to address issues faced by women, including violence, at the community level. Many of these women had themselves survived domestic violence. Some of them had experience of dealing with the police and courts. When the activists in these panchayats needed intervention in court, they reached out to lawyers. I was one of the lucky lawyers that they reached out to.
Most cases that came to me were from Sunder Nagari and Nand Nagari in North-East Delhi.
After the PWDVA came into force in October 2006, we made applications under the PWDVA in some of the pending cases, and for new cases, the PWDVA quickly became our go-to remedy.
So, my practice straddles the period immediately before the PWDVA and immediately after it was brought into force. I must qualify, however, that most of my work in this area was between 2005 and 2019. After 2019, and until 2025,, for a variety of reasons, I did very little work in this area and it is only now, since midway through 2025, that I have resumed working on domestic violence cases. This is important to bear in mind while we discuss my experience of working with the PWDVA.
Asmita Basu: What changed with the enactment of the PWDVA?
Jawahar Raja: The Act made significant changes in substantive law as well as in procedural law.
The most significant changes in substantive law were threefold:
First, that domestic violence was not restricted to physical violence: economic violence – non-payment of maintenance, or depriving a woman of access to property – was equally domestic violence.
Second, the recognition that it was not only married women who could claim rights to maintenance and residence against their husbands or husbands’ families, but all women in ‘domestic relationships’ – i.e., all women sharing a household with blood relatives, or with persons related by adoption, or even with men with whom they shared relationships ‘in the nature of marriage’ –could now make such claims against their male counterparts in those relationships.
And third, an enshrining in the statute of what had gradually evolved through judicial precedent: the woman’s right to residence.
That ‘domestic violence’ did not mean only physical violence but could also mean structural or economic violence might not seem revolutionary outside the law. Enacted as law, it had the potential to alter the terrain on which family relations would be negotiated.
That domestic violence could be perpetrated not just in a marriage but also in natal families brought many more within the protection of law.
Giving legal status and protection to those in relationships in the nature of marriage was an important acknowledgement of the social reality of non-marital relationships – relationships that might not have been sanctified as marriage but that were nevertheless organised in marriage-like arrangements of sexual, economic, and social relations. Marriage had for long carried with it some protections for when the marital relationship collapsed or was stressed. Over the years, society was moving towards expanding those rights, especially in the assets created during a marriage, by recognising marriage itself as a ‘quasi-partnership’. The PWDVA gave protection to those in non-marital but marriage-like quasi-partnerships, when those arrangements came under strain. By this protection, many women who were vulnerable to exploitation were given recourse against the worst kinds of abuse.
The acknowledgement of ‘relationships in the nature of marriage’ while a significant change in substantive law also had very important practical/procedural consequences. Before the PWDVA, the preliminary issue to be navigated in many cases was whether the claimant had succeeded in establishing that the parties were married. In the period before cell phones and the ubiquity of cameras and photographs, meeting this threshold was sometimes difficult, especially for women who, having been forced out of the matrimonial home, had lost access to the few photographs or documents which might have proved the marriage. The PWDVA relieved this burden: no longer did you have to prove marriage itself because the remedy was premised on establishing a ‘relationship in the nature of marriage’, an easier evidentiary threshold to meet than marriage.
Judgments, such as Bharat Heavy Plates and Vessels Ltd. (1985), B.P. Achala v. S. Appi Reddy (2005), Bai Tahira A. vs. Ali Hussain Fissalli Chothia (1978), and Danial Latifi v. Union of India (2001) had already begun to develop the law on the married woman’s right to maintenance extending to a right to residence. The PWDVA’s acknowledgement that all women had a right, against their families, to shelter and residence placed that right on surer statutory footing. It was no accident that this statutory recognition came at almost the same time as the Hindu Succession Act was amended to give Hindu women rights in ancestral/family property.
The PWDVA’s most significant changes in procedural law were:
The creation of the office of ‘Protection Officers’. Before the PWDVA, in most proceedings, the first hurdle was having summons served on the opposite side. Under the PWDVA, the Protection Officer was tasked with ensuring that summons was served. Since, at least in Delhi where I practice, every court that was dealing with domestic violence cases had its own Protection Officer, it became possible for the courts to supervise this first step of the process. This meant that we would often have the respondent served and in court within a week of filing. That Protection Officers, who were directly responsible to the Magistrates, were to ensure service of court summons meant a significant reduction in the time between filing and the first effective court hearing.
Providing women access to courts and access to their economic rights at the first rung of the judicial system, the Magistrate, where they could bring all their claims in a single proceeding, whereas earlier, they may have had to institute multiple proceedings in different fora. This made the judicial system significantly more accessible. Most importantly, the remedy was before the Judicial Magistrate and not the Executive Magistrate. Experience, especially with other more recent laws such as The Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 (‘MWPSC Act’) has shown that remedies before the Executive Magistrate are clearly inadequate because they are not trained as judicial officers and are tasked with too many administrative responsibilities to be able to render effective adjudication and relief.
Further, Section 26 of the Act stipulated that the rights recognized in the statute could be accessed in any other proceeding including, in pending proceedings. This again was a significant procedural facility – not having to institute fresh proceedings if parties were already in court in other proceedings.
The PWDVA was significant because in some respects it legislated what had been developed gradually through judicial interpretation and in others it broke new ground.
Asmita Basu: Who are the women using the PWDVA, and against whom is the Act being used?
Jawahar Raja: While in court, I have observed that the dockets of magistrates seem to have a fair sprinkling of women and cases from across the socio-economic spectrum. Of course, this is strictly observational and not based on any systematic analysis.
Initially, all the applicants I was filing cases for were very disadvantaged, and sometimes, even the respondents were barely making the minimum wage. Many of these women had very little prior independent engagement with institutions – their engagements had always been mediated by the family. Their first port of call when faced with violence were the Mahila Panchayats, who played a crucial role in recognising domestic violence and guiding the women towards the remedies under the PWDVA.
In later years, I represented several women who came from a middle class or very wealthy background, where claims for maintenance were substantial and the properties were high-value, including very expensive real estate in London and New York.
Asmita Basu: In what circumstances do women opt to use the PWDVA?
Jawahar Raja: I don’t think women come with a preference for or against the PWDVA, 2005. Our decisions on whether to apply under the PWDVA, 2005 or some other statute are governed by the situation facing the person aggrieved, where, I think the lawyer has a big influence on choice of law and forum.
That being said, in my practice, we almost abandoned applications under Section 125 of Code of Criminal Procedure with the coming of the PWDVA, 2005. Why file applications with limited remedies when the PWDVA, 2005 provided a wider range of options?
Asmita Basu: What are the most commonly sought orders?
Jawahar Raja:
Protection from violence, including injunctions from harassment of family and friends, and injunctions from harassment at the workplace, over the phone etc.
Protection against eviction from the household
Maintenance
Return of properties
Protection of the custody of children
Asmita Basu: Over the years, how has the right to reside been applied and interpreted?
Jawahar Raja: In its early years, the right to residence suffered a significant reversal in the Supreme Court’s narrow reading of Section 2 (s), ‘shared household’ – the locus of the right to residence in the PWDVA – in S.R. Batra v. Taruna Batra (2006). The Court limited ‘shared household’ to “..the house belonging to or taken on rent by the husband, or the house which belongs to the joint family of which the husband is a member.” thereby excluding houses that were in the name of the parents of the spouse/male partner.
This was an overly narrow reading – one that did not account for the fact that the PWDVA’s definition of ‘shared household’ had deliberately avoided traditional property law categories of ‘ownership’ and ‘possession’. High Courts began chipping away at this error, until finally, in Satish Chander Ahuja v. Sneha Ahuja (2021), S.R. Batra was set aside, and the law was restored to its correct position.
In Vimlaben Ajitbhai Patel v. Vatslaben Ashokbhai Patel (2008), the Supreme Court had already held that “The Domestic Violence Act provides for a higher right in favour of a wife. She not only acquires a right to be maintained but also thereunder acquires a right of residence. The right of residence is a higher right."
As with all areas of law, courts today have to balance conflicting equities, most commonly, the conflict between claims by senior citizens under the MWPSC Act and the claims under the PWDVA.
Asmita Basu: Has obtaining maintenance become more efficacious since the PWDVA came into force?
Jawahar Raja: Yes, it has. This might not always seem obvious, given the long delays that still beset applications, but as someone who has litigated such claims before the PWDVA and after, I can see that there has been a marked change.
There is still much that needs to be done to ensure quick adjudication and relief, but a substantial reason for delays is not specific to maintenance claims or the PWDVA: too many cases and too few judges.
I don’t think there can be any doubt at all that the PWDVA has had a very significant impact on access to maintenance.
Notably, the community has also been able to mobilise the law to greater effect. In Delhi, our High Court had already been sharpening the adjudication of the right to maintenance by a series of procedural innovations: in Annurita Vohra v. Sandeep Vohra (2004), the Court stipulated a rule of thumb to determine claims to maintenance; in Bharat Hegde v. Saroj Hegde (2007), the Court delineated factors that were relevant in determining maintenance claims; and in a series of decisions beginning in 2011 (Puneet Kaur v. Inderjit Singh Sawhney and then in Kusum Sharma v. Mahinder Kumar Sharma), the Courts reminded matrimonial lawyers about the different tools available in procedural law to discover the wealth and economic status of parties – the most significant burden in establishing claims for maintenance. With Kusum Sharma’s case in 2015, it became mandatory for both parties to file detailed affidavits of income, assets and liabilities – a practice that was adopted for the whole country by the Supreme Court in Rajesh v. Neha (2021).
Many of these significant developments in the law happened in non-PWDVA proceedings but have had a significant impact on how maintenance is adjudicated under the PWDVA as well. Cumulatively, these changes have significantly improved the adjudication of maintenance claims, but too few judges and too many cases have meant that the adjudication of maintenance claims still takes too long.
Asmita Basu: To what extent has the law served women from marginalised communities and those subject to intersecting forms of discrimination?
Jawahar Raja: In my experience, it has made a significant contribution. In the early days of the PWDVA, I was sceptical of what effect ‘protection orders’ could have in such cases. Surely, everybody knew that physical violence against a woman was an offence? What purpose, then, would an order to desist from physical violence serve? In practice, however, such orders had a significant impact in either completely stopping the physical violence or in giving the aggrieved woman more leverage at home or at the police station. Even in cases where the threat of violence did not evaporate, an application under the PWDVA made the incidents less likely, less frequent, and where they did happen, less vicious.
Further, in maintenance claims for underprivileged women, there are significant difficulties in proving the income and assets of the respondent. Here, judicial pronouncements that where the claimant was unable to establish the respondent’s income, the court will presume the statutory minimum wage as the respondent’s income meant that orders for payment of at least some maintenance would follow.
That claims for restitution and compensation could be bundled-up with claims for protection orders and maintenance – without the significant expense of court fees that such claims would have carried if they were made under the ordinary civil law and not under the PWDVA – allowed us to prosecute a clutch of claims in a common petition. This meant a significant reduction of effort, time, and money, particularly important for underprivileged women for whom every meeting with the lawyer and every attendance in court counted in time and lost wages.
Especially for underprivileged women, access to the courts itself significantly alters the balance of power. Often, respondents in these cases are also underprivileged and do not have easy access to legal recourse. Where the dispute involves such parties, even notices from Mahila Panchayats can be the proverbial thumb on the balance in favour of the woman. Summons from Court can have an even more significant impact on that balance.
Asmita Basu: Has the law been useful in addressing violence by natal families?
Jawahar Raja: Yes, I have litigated cases under the Act against fathers and brothers.
Asmita Basu: Has the role of the Protection Officer created a bureaucratic hurdle in women’s access to justice?
Jawahar Raja: Not in my experience.
I do believe, however, that there is a need to re-imagine the office of the protection officer. Unfortunately, Protection Officers have today been reduced to court factotums, mechanically filling-out forms to deposit them in the system, while the statute imagines them as the first point of contact for women in distress, empowered to develop and deploy plans to prevent immediate violence.
In my years of interaction with the women activists from the Mahila Panchayats, I saw the significant support they were able to provide to women in distress. It seemed to me that they were able to provide this support because they were from the same community as the women they were helping, because they had similar experiences being survivors of domestic violence themselves, and because of their accumulated years of experience navigating a hostile system, first as victims, and then as activists. Protection officers, on the other hand, are educated and trained social workers but have little connection with the communities that the aggrieved women come from and lack both the specific skills and the experience of those activists. Perhaps as we mark twenty years of the PWDVA, we must examine if there are ways in which the Mahila Panchayat system, or other similar systems that are grounded in community participation, could support or supplement the office of the protection officer.
Asmita Basu: A common complaint is that judicial delays have defeated the purpose of the PWDVA. What is your view? Is the PWDVA effective despite these delays?
Jawahar Raja: One has to just imagine how much worse the situation would be without the PWDVA and the answer to this question would be obvious. Judicial delays are endemic to our system, and they plague PWDVA cases just as they plague all others.
Asmita Basu: Have there been any changes in the use of Section 498A after the enactment of the PWDVA?
Jawahar Raja: In my experience, the use of Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (‘IPC’) has changed over time, but I am not sure that the PWDVA might have anything to do with it. Section 498A remains an important statutory recognition that certain kinds of marital cruelty must meet criminal sanction. And it continues to remain a pressure point in matrimonial disputes. The courts have had some say in alleviating what they see as misuse or abuse of Section 498A of which there is some anecdotal evidence. Although, I have not come across any evidence that Section 498A is either more or less ‘abused’ than any other provision of criminal law, such as Section 420 of the IPC (cheating), or Unlawful Activities (Prevention )Act, 1967, or Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002. In any event, I am not sure that the PWDVA itself has in any significant way changed how we understand Section 498A or how we litigate it. This is, however, only an impression. I would imagine a question such as this would require carefully crafted socio-legal study and analysis.
Asmita Basu: What challenges and opportunities do you see in efforts to address domestic violence in the coming years?
Jawahar Raja: As noted earlier, I was not doing PWDVA cases between 2019 and 2025, and I have only recently resumed litigating these cases, so I may not be best placed to answer this question.
With that qualification, and speaking only as a lawyer, my sense is that we have not fully explored the potential of the Protection Officer under the PWDVA. We are going to have to find more creative ways of using the office of the Protection Officer, perhaps in conjunction with other institutions such as the Mahila Panchayats, if we are to prevent domestic violence.
In addition, we need a better inventory of service providers and shelter homes under the Act. Especially for women from underprivileged backgrounds, well appointed and functioning shelter homes can be the difference between safety and violence; in the worst cases they might even be the difference between life and death. An online search of the Delhi government website reveals that the Govt has notified homes as shelter homes under the PWDVA. My experience of trying to find a shelter home for an aggrieved person about 10 years ago was very poor. We were unable to find a home that would take the survivor in. I am not sure if the situation has improved, especially since all the shelter homes that are today mentioned on the Government’s website existed back in the day. Each of these were homes for destitute women, already established and operating under pre-existing statutes and schemes that had merely been additionally notified as shelter homes under the PWDVA.
We also need a reckoning with the legal services available to women in distress and even to respondents in cases under the PWDVA. What does good quality legal representation look like in the case of an aggrieved person? What does good quality legal representation look like in the case of a respondent? How quickly are parties able to access any legal representation and is the representation they get of an acceptable quality?
More generally, the PWDVA is meant to protect women from being treated as ‘less than’. ‘Dignity’ then – the idea that each person has intrinsic value and worth – animates the PWDVA as it does our Constitution. How do we ensure that this animating spirit of the Constitution and the PWDVA becomes part of the way that we organise our families and our social lives?
Asmita Basu: Any areas of law reform still pending?
Jawahar Raja: Several common law jurisdictions have developed the ‘community of property’ regime to better reflect the realities of marriage or ‘relationships in the nature of marriage’. This regime treats property and assets acquired during a relationship as belonging to both parties, irrespective of who paid for the property or in whose name it was acquired. It better accounts for the different labours that parties bring to relationships, and provides for a more equitable division of assets at the end of the relationship. This is a reform that should have happened many years ago; it must now happen sooner than later.
Further, the Supreme Court in two decisions, D. Velusamy v. D. Patchaiammal (2010) and Indra Sarma v. V.K.V. Sarma (2013) has held that where a woman knowingly entered a relationship with a married man, such a relationship was disqualified from being considered a relationship in the nature of marriage. The Court arrived at this conclusion because it drew an inapposite equivalence between ‘relationships in the nature of marriage’ and ‘common law marriages’. Since Velusamy and Indra Sarma, courts have tried to refocus on a multi-factor test in determining whether a relationship qualified as a ‘relationship in the nature of marriage’, but the finding that entering into a relationship with a married man knowing that he is married, necessarily excluded the relationship from the protections of the PWDVA is misplaced and must be overruled.
