THE JANUARY 2026 issue of the ‘Staying Alive’ series – a year long special series commemorating twenty years of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (‘PWDVA’) – takes us through the insights of Anjali Dave, whose experience working with survivors of violence in the criminal justice system laid the seeds of the idea of a ‘Protection Officer’. Dave was a pioneer of the TISS Special Cell, and her veteran experience in counseling and casework shaped not only the drafting of the law, but also its interpretation when it came to truly engaging and understanding the needs of India’s domestic violence survivors.
Asmita Basu: Anjali, could you start by telling us a little bit about how you came into the work of drafting the law and where it all started.
Anjali Dave: The essential space came from the Special Cell’s work, and talking about it, working with women, discovering ways to,“help women in their journey of fight against domestic violence.”
The Special Cell engaged with survivors, not with women who had given up. Here were women who were ready to fight back against violence, in whatever form that they understood. The typical understanding of how women who have been violated are – sad, broken – was shattered when we first met these survivors, when we started working forty years ago.
Our premise, when we started the Special Cell, was to be the first point of contact in the criminal justice system. At that time, as part of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, we undertook field-based initiatives, and met extensively with women’s organisations. We also worked with many women who worked on this subject in Mumbai and we used to send our cases to Indira, who was one of them. When Indira first heard about our work, she visited us at the Special Cell one day out of the blue. This is how our momentum picked up
Bit by bit, the conversation became about Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code – what it was doing, the arguments surrounding it, and how our criminal courts are unable to do anything. We understood that eighty percent of survivors simply wanted the violence to stop and wanted to go back to their homes, meaning that they did not want to file a case under 498A. But the question remained – how do we work with that?
In the 1980s, Indira wrote in a book that we need something akin to a Domestic Violence Act. It literally took us 25 years to manifest this proposal into reality.
The Special Cell started working in 1984. In 1997, the International Centre for Research on Women (‘ICRW’), a global research organisation, convinced us to undertake a particular research. The first part of this research was to look at the data we had collected at the Special Cell. The other part of this research was to look at women who had registered cases under Section 498A.
Asmita Basu: Was the Special Cell already in existence when you started?
Anjali Dave: I was one of the first social workers. Others like Mrinal Gore and socialist groups also wanted to work on issues like dowry deaths, lack of response from police and such.
In 1997, when we started researching 498A, we wanted to hear the voice of the women. What are the women saying about 498A? Why is their voice not reaching the police? Why are the cases falling apart – falling through police records?
We started combing through cases regarding women who had faced violence and survived in order to understand how the entire process had panned out in the police stations.
