What if a woman stops doing what she is supposed to do? Will that be challenged in our courts? What if she refuses to leave her parents after marriage, and does not accept the ‘traditional’ arrangement of society?
Do we have any law for a woman’s parents who are abandoned right after she gets married off? She has no right to fight her in-laws or husband if they deny any help or contact to her parents. Then what is the need for this judgement which has been given from a single perspective? Why has the separation of women from their ageing parents been taken for granted?
The judgement of the Supreme Court regarding the separation of a Hindu son from their parents as grounds for divorce is the certificate given to womanhood of being less fortunate to be born as a woman. The country where marital rape is not a crime because there can be no evidence of the same, as the voice of a woman alone is not enough to certify her pain.
I wonder how they can prove in court for such cases where women can be easily victimised on such grounds even if she is not the one separating her husband from his parents. When a woman leaves her family and ‘adjusts’ herself into another family, she may have to face hatred, jealousy and other emotions. It is part of the process of adjustment and maladjustment that people in the family might like or dislike for various reasons. In those cases, how will the court protect the women who can be wrongly penalised by her in-laws, citing the same reason of separation to initiate divorce and differences between the couple?
Women tend to understand separation as she leaves her own family and settles in another. I am not sure of the number of cases where a woman would become the reason to separate her husband from his parents yet the judiciary pronounces such a verdict where thousands of women can be abandoned based on this, specifically from the lower strata of the society where women are not necessarily educated and self-dependent.
Moreover, it’s a shame that there are no laws against marital rape – something that is rampant in the same society – and is a form of domestic violence.
Our judicial system just served to a different facet of exploitation of women in our patriarchal society. Her character can be assassinated in courts and society, for one more reason, no matter the merit of the case.