The recent suicide of Bengaluru engineer Atul Subhash has dominated headlines. His suicide note and video, detailing allegations of harassment and false cases filed by his wife and her family, have ignited a furious debate. At the heart of it is the significant number of false cases, misusing laws meant to protect women to instead blackmail and settle scores.
A 2020 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report concluded that of the more than one lakh cases against husbands and their relatives subjecting wives to cruelty, more than 5,000 were false. That is a staggering number of innocent people who were subjected to unjustified and life-altering persecution. Although more than 16,000 such cases were dismissed by 2020 for being false, or having insufficient evidence, it also raises disturbing questions about how many of the thousands of other accused might also be ultimately found innocent.
It begs the question of the fairness of the law. One of the most fundamental principles of legal philosophy was summarised by the 18th century English jurist William Blackstone as, “It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” By that yardstick, Indian laws of this nature have failed miserably and are an abomination.
Illustration: Deni Lal
That is not to say that laws are not needed to protect India’s women from domestic violence, dowry and workplace sexual harassment. Sadly, such scourges continue to plague huge numbers of women. The fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS) notes that one of every three married women between the ages of 18 and 49 reports physical, emotional or sexual violence by their spouse.
On the other hand, domestic and workplace violence and abuse is hardly a one-way street and men, too, are victims of it. Moreover, various studies attest to this being a cross-cultural phenomenon, cutting across nations. In recent years, the Indian Journal of Community Medicine concluded that 52 per cent of men experienced gender-based violence; the UK’s national statistics office says that one in every three victims of domestic abuse is male; and a US sexual violence survey reported that 44 per cent of men face domestic violence at least once in their lifetime.
Those statistics make a compelling case for gender-neutral laws to combat domestic and workplace harassment, abuse and violence. In fact, they also make a mockery of the presumption behind our current laws—that such violence can only be perpetrated by men against women. The misuse of such laws has already been acknowledged by the Supreme Court. In a landmark judgment on a 2014 case, it noted that, “In quite a number of cases, bedridden grandfathers and grandmothers of the husbands, their sisters living abroad for decades, are arrested.”
But the case for gender-neutral laws goes far deeper. Our Constitution guarantees that the state shall not discriminate against any citizen on the grounds of religion, caste or sex, among other criteria. It is, in fact, a foundational principle of modern democracies that every individual citizen enjoys equal rights. That is why many democracies have already enacted gender-neutral laws in relation to harassment, violence, abuse and rape, with several others making regular progress towards it. It is high time we did, too.
A related but distinct issue is the need to crack down hard on false cases of all kinds. Sadly, the punishments for perjury, as specified by Indian law, have rarely been imposed, especially imprisonment. Giving false evidence to misuse the law for pecuniary gains, or to exact revenge, is a grievous offence, which can only be rooted out by courts rigorously imposing the prescribed penalties.
Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda is National Vice President of the BJP and is an MP in the Lok Sabha.