Call her the divorce doctor: How this Indian lawyer is trying to help people whose parents are in a marital dispute

Vedika Dave sharing lived experience and now her experience as a advocate. Pics/@vedika_llb

In August last year, Instagram saw a new entrant when a confident, curly-haired, and bright-eyed woman started talking about what her mother went through while getting a divorce. Vedika Dave, aka @vedika_llb, is a advocate who is currently practising in Chandigarh, in the high court of Punjab and Haryana, and has become the voice of lakhs of adults who end up in the middle of a marital dispute between their parents. She brings to light the mental and physical trauma both women and men go through during a divorce.

Dave is a Mumbai girl who's biological father committed bank frauds and forgery, trapped her mom and absconded from the country. Her mom eventually married again and within a very short time span he blindsided her mom by filing for divorce on grounds of cruelty. It was because this case went on for 10 years that Dave studied law and successfully delivered final arguments right after graduation without a license to practice in this case.

Today, Dave's content largely talks about the trouble that many of the clients she sees go through. These are "both men and women", she clarifies when we get on a call with her. We mention how her videos have organically evolved from her lived experience, to what she now sees others going through in the courtroom. "Yes, and these are factual things that are happening in court," she says. We ask what was the intention behind starting her account in the first place? "I have a creative side that needed an outlet. And also, the intention was always that even if one person hears it and if they feel like they've been helped or heard, then that's good enough," she says.

Pic/iStock

Dave has amassed a following of almost 60,000 followers as of now, but this comes with heavy responsibility and a bit of helplessness as she constantly receives DMs from children who do not have tools to deal with divorce. "Little girls who are 14, 15, and 16 DM me saying, "My dad beats my mom. How do I help her (their mom)? How do I save her? How do I get her to get a divorce because she doesn't want one'. In such cases, how do I even help?" she says.

The message seems to trigger Dave's own trauma at these ages: "This one thing I vividly remember from my childhood was when my mom was still living with my biological father and I must have been in Class 1 or 2. She made me memorise our home address and the police phone number just in case I had to call the cops," she adds.

When we ask how her mother feels about the content she makes? The air immediately gets lighter. "She is my biggest critic," she says while laughing. "She often sends me someone else's video/reel and says ‘See she is talking so clearly. Look at her. Her hair is not in her face'. After all of this [what the mother-daughter duo went through], we don't take ourselves too seriously," she adds with a smile in her voice.

Dave also says that her becoming a advocate was not an active choice. "Law found me. There was no free will in this [becoming advocate]. It was the situation at the time; especially during the second time that the divorce proceedings were happening," she says.

It was during this time that Dave saw firsthand what lack of economic freedom meant for a woman, "If a woman does not have money, you don't have any way to get out of bad situations. You don't have anything to pay your advocate. You're stuck. So the only thing I could do was empower myself in a different way," she adds.

The future, though, is full of possibilities. "Right now, I am happy. But also if I don't learn new things now, then it'll be very tough to start from scratch when I'm, you know, 45, 50. So, yeah," she says.

In Chandigarh, Dave is at a criminal law firm which also takes civil cases. "I am under senior advocates, but I don't want to pigeon-hole myself. There is so much to learn," she adds.

60,000
Followers that Dave has amassed as of now