RAJESH VAKHARIA,SIFF NAGPUR : In the era of gender biased Acts and laws viz. 498a,DV,CrPC 125, Divorce, Child custody, Dowry Death, sexual harassment etc. in India when Men’s organisations like SIFF demands for any genuine amendment, penalty clauses for misuse in these gender biased laws or making these laws gender neutral everyone right from government, judiciary & feminists use to put forth an argument that the affected persons or cases are very few and far and small affecting section of persons cannot be the base for any amendment or framing of any new gender neutral laws.
Come, let us postmortem their argument .
However, when the feminists and government (for free funding & power respectively) desired to frame a gender biased law in the name of protection to women from domestic violence, they have acted contrary to their above argument and enforced a very clumsily drafted gender biased law called “ Protection of women from Domestic Violence Act,2005”. In this title of Act, everybody be it Government, feminists, society or legal fraternity should give importance to the two most important words i.e “Woman” &“Domestic Violence”.
No one can deny that, Mother-in-Laws, sister-in laws and other females in husband’s family are too Women and besides living in a Domestic relationship also forms a big section of women in society.
So either this DV Act should have been named as “Protection of Wife from Domestic Violence” or all women in domestic relation including Mother-in-law, Sister-in-law & other females in husband’s family should be given protection under this Act.
Then the Big question remains, why this Act is named as Protection of Women from Domestic Violence ?
The truth is, this is done just to maligning the perception of society & government by falsely showing/projecting a broad coverage under this Act and to maliciously justifying the protection need to a larger section of society by way of this most clumsily and ill intentionally framed Law. This Act bears the name as if this Act is meant to provide protection to all women in India(i.e 48-50%population). Whereas, in India, almost 48-50 % is the total women population out of which if we exclude unmarried girls, old aged women, mother-in laws and sister-in-laws (which are not covered under this Act) I am sure this Act is made to protect only 10-20 % of women in the society. Whereas the misuse of this Act can very well drastically affect almost 80 % of total society. So, How justifiable is the wisdom of our Government or law makers ?
When a special Act(PWDVA) which lacks the balance of natural justice and is direct violative of fundamental right of life & liberty can be enforced for fairly very small section of society why not any genuine amendment, penalty clause for misuse or new law can be framed as is being demanded by the Men’s organization SIFF?