Abuse of anti-dowry law: Separating myth and facts

The abuse and misuse of section 498A — enacted to protect women from domestic violence — has so exercised public imagination in recent times that it has assumed mythic proportions.

- Namita Bhandare

The media has been wringing its hands. A movie that "will expose how false dowry harassment cases have become a devastating tool of legal abuse" is underway. And the Supreme Court has joined the lamentation.

But first, a brief history. Section 498A was introduced in 1983 when "bride burning" — the murder of young women in so-called kitchen accidents for not bringing adequate dowry — was at its peak. Mothers like Satya Rani Chadha whose daughter Shashi Bala was pregnant when she was killed, and other activists, led a protest that eventually resulted in protections in law against cruelty by a husband and his relatives. "In those days, the dowry act was very weak," says Manjiri Jaruhar, Bihar's first woman IPS officer, then posted in Bokaro. "We knew women were being killed for dowry but could never establish the link." Section 498A, a non-bailable, non-compoundable offence that allowed arrests without a warrant, was intended to "give teeth to cases where women had been killed for dowry," says Jaruhar.