The first year of Rajesha Hamar’s married life was peaceful. In the second, her husband began to drink. Then he started to punch and throttle her when they argued. Then he began to sexually assault her, in front of the relatives with whom they shared their one-room home in a Delhi slum.
After 18 months of this, Ms. Hamar fled to her mother’s house with her baby daughter. She left everything behind, including the dowry her family had paid with most of their savings – clothes, dishes, a motorbike, and her gold jewellery.
In the year since she left, Ms. Hamar’s husband has paid her nothing in maintenance and contributed nothing to the care of their child. She keeps her toddler, Sakshi, fed with the $25 a month she earns housecleaning. Her husband, the neighbours tell her, is still drinking and has voiced no remorse for beating her.
Nevertheless, what Ms. Hamar wants more than anything is to go back to him. This is not delusional battered-wife-syndrome, but rather cold-eyed realism on her part.
“If I don’t go back, I’ve got nothing,” she says, “I’ll never have anything.”
With those words, Ms. Hamar speaks for tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of Indian women who are trapped in abusive or broken marriages by archaic divorce laws and a dysfunctional court system.
Divorce and separation are both on the rise here, as customs in India shift with rapid economic growth and social change. But in the vast majority of cases, it is men who petition for divorce – because women suffer terribly if their marriages end.
“In the West, women also pay an economic price for divorce, but here it is much more dramatic, because we don’t have the basic rights and entitlements we should have,” said Kirti Singh, an advocate at India’s Supreme Court.
Ms. Singh is spearheading a drive by women’s groups for the reform of divorce law; she recently concluded a series of “tribunals” held across the country in which divorced and separated (and many now-impoverished) women from all economic classes testified about their trials under the law. (That process, and Ms. Singh’s research, were funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre
A grim confluence of factors makes divorce punishing for Indian women. The country has no law for the division of marital property; items belong to the person who bought them, and typically men put every major purchase such as a home or a vehicle in their own names. When assets are divided, women frequently end up with none.
There is no automatic right to maintenance payments in the case of separation; women must hire lawyers and go to court to petition for this – a step that is already out-of-reach for millions of poor and illiterate women. Less than half of women ever ask for maintenance. They must make a separate petition for child support. In the clogged and dysfunctional legal system, it often takes years to obtain even an interim order.
When these are awarded, they tend to be negligible, Ms. Singh said. Her research found that maintenance awards were for between one-twentieth and one-tenth of a man’s stated income. “The biggest problem for a woman is to prove what he actually has.” With the dysfunctional tax-collection process here, men typically report only a small fraction of what they actually earn – “whether they are daily wage-earners or businessmen, that’s the same.”
Then, regardless of the size of the award, the maintenance orders are almost never enforced, Ms. Singh added, so that in practice, women frequently receive nothing. Forty-six per cent of the women in her survey said their payments did not arrive, and of those who received them, 60 per cent said the funds did not come on time.
Finally, very few women succeed in having their dowry – or their stridhan, a gift such as jewellery that a family may give a bride to ensure her some economic independence – returned. The practice of paying dowry is illegal in India but still widely practised; the Prohibition of Dowry Act states first that dowry is illegal, and secondly, that if it is paid in defiance of the law, it must be returned in the event of divorce.
