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India grants divorce to man whose wife refused to live with
in laws
Activists say women made more vulnerable by ruling given on grounds of ‘cruelty’ in case
where wife attempted suicide

Vidhi Doshi
Sat 8 Oct 2016 12.16 BST

India’s supreme court has granted a divorce to a man on the grounds of “cruelty” after his wife
refused to share a home with her in-laws, effectively ruling that a married woman must live with
her husband’s family.

Justice Anil R Dave, one of the the most senior judges in India, said the wife’s desire to leave her
in-laws’ home was inspired by “western thought” and violated traditional values of Indian
Hindus.

“In normal circumstances, a wife is expected to be with the family of the husband after the
marriage,” stated the supreme court ruling, which also dismissed the wife’s attempt to kill herself
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as a plot to “torture” her husband and his relatives.

There is no legal obligation for men to live with their parents, so the ruling still allows couples to
live independently if men choose to set up a separate home. But the case had been seen as a test,
pitting the rights of women against traditional Hindu values.

Activists said the ruling left millions of women who were in unhappy marriages or with abusive
husbands even more vulnerable.

“If you look at the language the court has used, it’s very regressive,” said Tenzing Chusang, from
the Women’s Rights Initiative, a lawyers’ collective. “If you make the grounds of divorce very
lenient for men, it makes the woman very vulnerable.”

Divorce in India carries a huge stigma: there are few financial provisions for divorced women, and
little legal support.

Chusang said: “In India there’s no such thing as shared matrimonial property or equal division of
assets. All she gets if the husband divorces her, and that too after years of litigation, is a minimal
maintenance payment. What can she do? She has to stay.”

The judge said the wife’s claims that her husband was having an affair were fabricated, and that
her suicide attempt was a devious attempt to manipulate her husband’s family.

He focused on the “tremendous stress” the husband might have faced if she had succeeded in
killing herself. “One can imagine how a poor husband would get entangled into the clutches of
law [after a suicide], which would virtually ruin his sanity, peace of mind, career and probably his
entire life,” the judgment said.

It said a suicide attempt alone was grounds for ending a marriage. “In our opinion, only this one
event was sufficient for the appellant husband to get a decree of divorce on the ground of cruelty,”
it said.

The case, which has been moving through the glacially slow Indian justice system for more than
two decades, was brought by a man from the southern Indian state of Karnataka. He wanted to
divorce his wife after she insisted on leaving her in-laws’ home, but had been denied a divorce by
the high court.

In India, women are expected to move in with the relatives of their husbands, follow the rules and
customs of their home, and ideally, blend in seamlessly as a new daughter.

But in reality forced or quickly arranged marriages mean many young women marry into a life of
near slavery, being responsible for all household chores and expected to obey their in-laws’ every
demand. Often, they are barred from taking paid work, and have little control of the family purse.
In rural areas, many women are prohibited from wearing western clothing, meeting friends after
dark or leaving the house.

Some women have been pushing back against these restrictions, as the wife in this case tried to
do. But the judge ruled that the “pious obligation” of Hindu men to look after their parents took
precedence over her wishes.

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“It is not a common practice or desirable culture for a Hindu son in India to get separated from his
parents on getting married at the instance of the wife, especially when the son is the only earning
member in the family,” the ruling said.

It is the latest blow for women’s rights in a country where sexual violence and trafficking is
common, marital rape is not a crime, and discrimination is endemic.

In a 2012 poll of gender specialists around the world, India was voted the worst G20 country in
which to be a woman. It was ranked worse than Saudi Arabia, where women can’t legally drive
and were only allowed to vote for the first time in 2015.

The ruling also risks entrenching a dangerously imbalanced sex ratio, by endorsing parental
preference for sons, who are seen as being more likely to support their parents in old age. The
2011 census found that for every 1,000 boys, there were only 918 girls. Sex-selective abortion was
believed to account for much of the gap.

“The court is emphasising that it’s the son’s duty to look after his parents,” said Chusang. “So
basically it’s saying that [a daughter] is not really part of the family. She’s going to leave, she’s
never going to look after her parents in old age, and therefore she has no value.”

In India, suicide hotlines can be found here. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116
•

123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis
support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here

Topics
India
Women's rights and gender equality
Divorce
Gender
Women
South and Central Asia
Women's rights and gender equality
news

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