A Curative Bench, led by Chief Justice of India T.S.
Thakur, has upheld a 2014 Supreme Court of India(SCI)verdict that men cannot be
“automatically” arrested on dowry harassment complaints filed by their
wives.
The 4-judge Bench found no fault with the
verdict that the dowry harassment law had become a “menace”, more often
used as “weapons rather than shields by disgruntled wives”. Justices
Anil R. Dave, J.S. Khehar and P.C. Ghose were in the Bench.
Days
before his retirement in 2014, Justice Chandramauli Kumar Prasad led a
Bench that lamented that courts were filled with mothers-in-law,
sisters-in-law and fathers-in-law and husbands facing prosecution under
Section 498 A (dowry harassment) of the Indian Penal Code.
Dowry
harassment is a cognisable and non-bailable offence. If guilty, a
person faces up to three years' imprisonment and fine. Women’s rights
groups were irked by the verdict, and the National Commission for Women
sought a rare curative relief in the court.
In his
verdict, Justice Prasad pointed to a “phenomenal increase in matrimonial
disputes in recent years” even as the “institution of marriage is
greatly revered in this country”
“The simplest way
to harass is to get the husband and his relatives arrested under this
provision. In a quite number of cases, bedridden grandfathers and
grandmothers of the husbands, their sisters living abroad for decades
are arrested,” the verdict observed.
Presenting
government crime statistics to show that 1.97 lakh people were arrested
in 2012 for dowry harassment, nearly a quarter of those being women, the
verdict said: “This depicts that mothers and sisters of the husbands
were liberally included in their arrest net.”
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