Irony-clad claws

In 2002 I walked up the narrow stairs to the office of Shakti Shalini a womenrsquos organisation in Jungpura New Delhi I did it unenthusiastically as a matter of form because I was making a film about feminism and Shakti Shalini had emerged out of the feminist agitations against dowry in the 1970s80s Despite the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 the practice persisted When the law was adhered to dowry demands were often disguised as pressure for financial lsquohelprsquo after marriage with an underlying threat of divorce If unfulfilled harassment would often result in death by lsquoaccidentallyrsquo exploding kerosene stoves or apparent suicide The antidowry movement resulted in two amendments304B mdash which recognised such deaths as lsquodowry deathsrdquo and 498A wherein dowry harassment complaints merited automatic arrest The two women who ran Shakti Shalini were among the ordinary middleclass parents who having lost their daughters to dowry deaths had become activists committed to helping other famliesWhy was I reluctant to interview them I was young and I felt the issue of dowry was old so lsquodonersquo I wanted to talk about new emerging feminist issues which werenrsquot as discussedThe two women were a study in contrasts Satyarani Chadha was emotional full of regret mdash ldquohad I not married my daughter to that boy she might yet be aliverdquo Shahjahan Apa seemed to have moved on philosophically ldquoWhen the storm of the womenrsquos movement came and we saw our prisons clearly who would not rush towards freedomrdquo she said I talked to girls at the shelter saw picture upon picture of burned bodies portrait after heartbreaking portrait of sweet young women each of whom was now a case number It was a humbling and enlightening moment Change is not neat New issues arise before old ones are resolved and the two must be tackled in tandem The limited window of our experience cannot show us the world If we donrsquot step out of our context we are trapped in it foreverAt the time 6000 dowry deaths were recorded annually The law hadnrsquot been enough Yet without a law there wasnrsquot even that tenuous port in a stormShahjahan Begum died in 2013 Satyarani Chadha won the Supreme Court case of her daughterrsquos dowry death this March after 34 years of legal battle Her daughterrsquos killers though had long vanished She died on July 2 Two days later the Supreme Court passed judgment against 498A on the basis of its misuse in some marital casesIs the law misused Of course Murderers get away with murder because the police donrsquot use the law properlyTerrorism laws are misused with false complaints or poor evidence and young men lose their youth to jail Would anyone agree these misused laws themselves should be removed Satyarani Chaddha had received only a kind of token justice but she never said the cause of her daughterrsquos death was the Dowry Prohibition Act and that it was better to have never challenged dowry The real issue lies in how the criminal justice system deals with these casesOver 9000 dowry deaths are now recorded annually About 10 per cent of the roughly 105 lakh dowry cases turn out to be false For the remaining 90 per cent without 498A the battle for justice in an unequal society has become even harder Numbers are a partial truth because each injustice has deep meaning for the individual who suffers it But removing 498A symbolises a lost opportunity for addressing the issue of reforming attitudes and procedures within the criminal justice system Without it the powerful will always misuse the law against those it is meant to protectParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at wwwparodevicomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper