Contextualizing DomesticViolence
In retrospect it could be said that the New Women's Movement in India, as ithas shaped itself since the 1980s, has fundamentally centred round the questionof the forms of violence against men.
The specific campaigns that are today read as the bench the movement-notably,those against custodial rapes murders and brought into focus the asymmetries ingender relations that undergird our social formations legal processes, and thevery notions of citizenship rights.
However emphasis on these "aberrant" manifestations of violenceobfuscated the issue of the more banal and everyday forms of abuse that womenare subjected to within the home. Flavia Agnes consistently argued since the1980s that by "placing dowry on a pedestal" in their campaigning andtheorizing an feminists have played into the hands of conservative that readgendered violence in terms of its exceptionalism rather than as the definingcontext of women's lives (Ames 1995: 109-10).
It is therefore, not surprising that while many Western countries againstdomestic violence in the 1970s and 1980s as yet no specific law in Indiapertaining to the issue' new legislations were promptly passed in the case ofcu rapes, dowry, sati, obscenity, and procurement of minors prostitution, by astate under pressure from feminist and democratic forces and eager to be seenas the guarantor of its citizens' rights. It is another matter that given thepatriarchal and class character of the state, almost all these laws remaindeeply flawed and in many cases counterproductive. However, a discussion ofthis is outside the scope of this chapter. The State Discourse on Domestic Violence
In 1983 and 1986, amendments were made to theexisting Criminal Law to take onboard the category of "cruelty towives" in terms that were diffuse or incomplete in definition, difficultto implement within the procedures of criminal law, and easy to circumvent. Forinstance, "cruelty" was defined as the causing of "grave injuryor danger to life, limb or death," thus leaving outside its ambit themundane or non-physical forms of violence of everyday life (Agnes, 1995:121-26). Another problem is that in the amendment domestic violence isdubiously sutured to dowry demand and harassment, with the result that often inthe perception of the police and the legal machinery, a claim to cruelty cannotby definition be made unless appended to the claim to dowry harassment. It isalmost as though it is only by invoking the criminality of dowry and relatedviolence that an intervention into the sacralized space of the family can bejustified.
It is only since the 1990s that domestic violence has been specificallyhighlighted as an endemic and pervasive reality of women's lives as well as afundamental violation of their rights. Globally, the Vienna Congress on HumanRights (1994) and the Fourth World Conference of Women at Beijing (1995) included this issue as acritical area of concern. Apart from identifying women's abuse as a humanrights issue, these also called for a crucial redefinition of what constitutesviolence against women in their intimate relationships. And, indeed, there hasbeen a radical redefinition and elaboration of the paradigm over the past fewyears both by international bodies and by Indian feminist forums such as theLawyers' Collective Women's Rights Initiative (LCWRI). The LCWRI defines domestic violence as "any act, omission orconduct which is of such a nature as to harm or injure or has the potential ofharming or injuring the health, safety or well-being of the person aggrieved orany child in the domestic relationship and includes physical abuse, sexualabuse, verbal and mental abuse and economic abuse" (LCWRI, 2002: 6). Astudy of domestic violence by the Research Centre for Women's Studies, SNDT,Mumbai, elaborates the term as "all acts perpetrated in the private domainof the home to secure women's subordination; and which is rationalized andsanctioned by the prevailing gender ideology. It is thus seen as going beyondthe legal definitions of physical assault, to include psychological and sexualviolence" (Poonacha and Pandey, 1999: 1).
Taken together, these two definitions clarify domestic violence as material practiceas well as the cultural-ideological context of its operation. This is not tosuggest that violence in the home is uniform across different locations. Thereare many forms of families; they inhabit varied contexts and are subject todifferent pressures; they must be seen in the specificity of theirconstellations as affective and economic units. Nor are ideological formationsdispersed uniformly across familial sites. While feminists believe that thebasic character of the Indian family unit is patriarchal, they also cautionthat patriarchal structures and ideologies are unevenly constituted, areconstantly in the process of reconstitution, and manifest differentially inshifting contexts. Further, we cannot assume a neat fit between familialstructures and familial ideologies. But, more about that later.
For now, the question is, given the urgency that the issue of domestic violencehas gathered, where is the Indian state in all this? Significantly, on December11, 2001, the Government of India, through the Ministry of Human ResourceDevelopment, published and circulated a bill on domestic violence. While granting the political significance of the inclusion of theissue on the state agenda, feminists across the board have unequivocallyrejected the specific proposals of the bill as it "not only falls short ofour expectations and of what is required to be done, but may actually turn outto be dangerous in its implications for women who are victims of domesticviolence" (LCWRI, 2002: 6).
Ideologically regressive in its exorbitation of the family; placing the welfareof the family above the well-being of the victimized woman, the bill,purporting to secure the woman's rights within the home, actually carrieswithin it the means for its own subversion (LCWRI, 2002: 21-8). If the billwere to be passed, abuse would have to be "habitual" (however that isto be determined) for it to be even recognized as violence by the law. Thedefinition of violence itself is impressively brief and surpassingly vague—habitualassaults, cruelty of conduct, forcing the woman to lead an "immorallife," or any conduct that "otherwise injures or harms the aggrievedperson." However, none of the above may constitute violence if the man wasacting "for his own protection or for the protection of his or another'sproperty" thus making available to the perpetrator of abuse the plea ofself-defence! Page I, Page II
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