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Malevolent shadow of misogyny spares none
This culture of misogyny is all pervasive and knows no boundaries, sometimes even amongst judges.
There’s no shortage of advice. Live-in relationships are “time pass”, temporary and fragile. After a breakup, it becomes difficult for the woman to “face society”. Middle-class morality cannot be ignored in a country like India. Adolescent girls must control their sexual urges and not get swayed for “two minutes of pleasure”.
If wives file complaints of dowry harassment by their husbands and in-laws they are “disgruntled housewives”. Those seeking their rightful maintenance are looking for a “windfall”. And while it is the moral duty of a husband to provide for his wife, she should not “squeeze milk”, whatever that means, from him.
It goes without saying that if she is qualified, then she should not “sit idle” but plunge right back into the job market even if she had quit her job at the time of marriage at the insistence of her husband and his family.
The definition of cruelty as a ground for divorce has some interesting variations and includes the failure to wear a mangalsutra, a wife’s insistence on living independently from her husband’s parents and even refusing to make tea for the husband’s guests. If she chooses a career over marriage or having children, she can expect no mercy.
Notwithstanding the launch of a handbook to combat gender stereotypes by the Supreme Court in August this year, high courts across the country and, occasionally, the Supreme Court itself, continue to play moral police: Advising an inter-faith couple seeking police protection against the pitfalls of living together, sermonising to women in abusive marriages and, even when providing relief, delivering homilies on the dangers of sexual pleasure. In the last example, the Calcutta high court actually acquitted a young boyfriend of the very grave charges filed against him under the POCSO (protection of children from child sex abuses) law.
But in another POCSO case, the opinion of a woman judge that a man unzipping before a child did not amount to sexual assault resulted in an uproar and her eventual voluntary retirement.
Most don’t receive even a frown of disapproval. “It is time for the Supreme Court to take action. You cannot have a culture of constitutional morality and propriety if you have judges of the high court repeatedly denying women agency,” senior advocate Rebecca John said.
Judges are not immune to bias or the malevolence of patriarchy, and this can show up in their judgments. The challenge before them is to examine a case purely on the strength of its merits, devoid of social conditioning and the temptation to make sweeping generalisations, particularly in matters relating to marriage, divorce and personal relationships.
Personal opinion can have very far-reaching consequences. For instance, one judge’s opinion that a woman’s clear no to sex was too “feeble” resulted in the acquittal of a man of rape charges.
Rape judgments in fact are a minefield of misogyny and gender stereotyping where judges can’t seem to agree if women are conniving devils or hapless devis. A study by law professor Mrinal Satish of 25 years of rape jurisprudence of 800 Supreme Court and high court cases found rape adjudication and sentencing replete with myths and stereotypes, including the notion that the chief harm of rape is not to a woman’s bodily autonomy but to her reputation and honour.
This culture of misogyny is all pervasive and knows no boundaries, sometimes even amongst judges. This past week there was an ugly display of it in open court, broadcast live on YouTube, when a junior woman judge of the Gujarat high court seemed to disagree with the senior male judge on the same bench. Justice Biren Vaishnav apologised a day later. But the question remained: Would he have flown off the handle had she been a man?
Namita Bhandare writes on gender. The views expressed are personal
