But
for a few details, it is a common tale. She is 33 and works as a
business consultant in Mumbai. Her first meeting with the man she
would eventually marry was in 2006. It was a meeting arranged by her
parents. She was taken in by his charm and the way his parents
embraced her. She married him six months later and moved to Pune. The
problems began soon after. An architect, he would travel on work for
months together, and while he was away, his father would hit her and
his mother would berate her. The husband dismissed all these as petty
issues. Meanwhile, he himself was emerging as a problem. “He would
say that his money is his,” she says, “but my money had to be
spent on maintenance of the home.” She remembers her father-in-law
asking for a car on her husband’s birthday. “New age dowry,”
she says. Despite all this, she says, she actually tried to make the
marriage work. But, in 2009, her father-in-law beat her up and threw
her out of the house. She went back to her parents and filed a case
for divorce. It was the beginning of another ordeal.
Her
husband denied that there was any problem between them. He swore he
loved her and wanted her back. Each time she went to court, she was
asked a trail of questions by the husband’s lawyer designed to
prove that he was a good husband. Did they ever go on a vacation? Did
he allow her to wear whatever she wanted? To counter this, her
lawyers asked questions that tried to show how her husband and his
family had inflicted mental and physical cruelty on her. Her husband
denied that he had any knowledge of all that she claimed was
happening to her in his house.
In
2011, several counselling sessions and court dates later, he filed
criminal charges against her, alleging that she stole jewellery from
his house when she left. When the police shut those cases on lack of
evidence, he took them to a civil court. “It had now become about
troubling me as much as he could,” she says, “I had to hire a
criminal lawyer.” As a counter-offensive, she filed an application
for alimony and maintenance. For this, she had to hire yet another
lawyer, but it worked. The court granted her Rs 8,000 per month as
maintenance. Her husband was also asked to compensate her for the
expenses she had incurred on lawyers over a period of three years.
“That’s when he buckled. I offered him a deal: don’t pay me
anything, just give me my freedom.”
Her
divorce was finally approved a few months ago, but she still has to
get the documents that declare her divorced. “It’s a long process
because you have to prove so much, and you don’t have the evidence
to prove things like being beaten up three years earlier. The judges
are fair and sharp, so they get it. But they are so overworked that
the hearing dates are a few months apart and there is just too much
paperwork. By the end of it, you have to strike deals. There is no
other way. I am drained after the [experience] and have lost so much
of my youth.”
Manju
Shah, her lawyer, says that the law in India is devised in such a way
that nobody gets away by citing flimsy reasons for divorce. “The
system does take time, but that is also because there are so many
divorces being filed. Also, mutual consent divorces are much
fewer—because one spouse always has an ego problem. They don’t
realise they need to let go. In India, proving your reasons is very
important. Sometimes, you just need to do what you can to get a
divorce. That’s why we adopted the alimony strategy.”
+++
The
biggest obstacle to getting a divorce in India is the need to
establish that you deserve one, says Mrunalini Deshmukh, a lawyer who
has co-authored a book on the subject with fellow lawyer Fazaa
Shroff-Garg: Breaking Up: Your Step-by-step Guide to Getting
Divorced. This book details different grounds on which you may be
granted a divorce. It also offers guidance on alimony matters,
maintenance (for both men and women) and all the laws you need to
know if you are thinking of putting an end to your marriage.
There
are two types of divorce: ‘contested’ and ‘by mutual consent’.
The latter is easily dealt with. The husband and wife have to file
separate petitions, undergo a set of mandatory counselling sessions,
and then get another court date after a six-month cooling off period.
If they still want a divorce on the second hearing, the judge usually
passes a judgment to that effect. But cases of mutual consent are
rare: only a fifth of all cases, in Deshmukh’s estimate.
Complications
arise when one spouse resists a divorce. This makes it a prolonged
process. If you want a divorce, you must devise a strategy to get
one, file a petition based on it (tactically modifying it if need
be), serve it to your spouse, go for a first date in court (where you
will be sent for counselling), attend a second date to present the
merits of your case, and then hope to get past this sticky stage to
discuss ‘issues of consideration’ and measures of interim relief
like maintenance, before you get a final decree nullifying your
marriage.
Deshmukh
and Shroff-Garg wrote this book in response to all the ignorance they
encountered on matters of divorce. In India, Deshmukh says, you need
to prove your case for a divorce thoroughly to get a judge to grant
you one. “You can’t just say, ‘We are not getting along’.
That happens in the US and UK, where if you have been apart for
enough time, you will surely get a divorce. But in India, except in
cases of divorce by mutual consent, you can’t say ‘I want a
divorce because we don’t get along’. You have to prove it.”
Since this is a subjective call, and can be contested by the spouse,
a divorce on such grounds is rarely ever granted in India. The point
of taking the testimony of contestants so seriously is to safeguard
their dignity and interests, since most of India’s contested cases
are of wives being left by their husbands. At lower socio-economic
levels, desertion is a serious issue of women’s rights. “They
need strict laws for divorce or they will get nothing,” says
Deshmukh.
That
also means that the well-off must wait for years for a divorce to
come through. Some of Deshmukh’s clients have waited for over a
decade. In the book, the two lawyers cite the example of a couple who
were back together by the time they got their divorce. The authors do
not blame the judges, but the system. “You first have to file an
interim application, then formal ones, then work out details that
both agree with,” says Deshmukh, “That takes time.”
Sometimes
lawyers are hired just to stall proceedinbgs and create delays. The
courts are usually understaffed and overburdened. One court typically
handles around 50-60 cases a day. Deshmukh herself gets five-six new
cases every day.
+++
The
book answers questions like ‘How do I prove my spouse is an unfit
parent?’, ‘What do I do if my spouse watches a lot of
p*rnography?’ and ‘What if my spouse is a s*x addict?’ It also
has some extraordinary case studies. The case of ‘Eijaz and Mala’,
for instance. Eijaz demanded dowry. But when she filed for divorce
citing ‘mental cruelty’, he contested it and said he wanted both
of them to be together. Deshmukh initiated a settlement and Eijaz
asked for crores of rupees, but finally haggled over the sum and gave
Mala a divorce. There is also the case of ‘Rohan and Maya’, in
which it was the husband at the receiving end. Maya, says the book,
would curse and batter her husband. On Deshmukh’s advice, Rohan
videotaped an incident that showed him being shouted at and slapped
by his wife. A medical test showed that she was suffering from
schizophrenia, and he was granted a divorce as well as custody of
their children.
In
many cases, it is not easy to determine one’s limits of tolerance.
Thirty-year-old Avinash Patil, who works in the BPO sector, says that
his wife was violent and wishes he had recorded it as evidence but
did not because he “loved her and never wanted the marriage to
end”. Now, he faces several criminal charges that his wife has
slapped on him, all of them related to domestic violence. Patil says
that he finds it hard to believe their marriage has come to this.
Theirs was an arranged marriage and he says he did all he could to
make it work. On their two-week honeymoon to Kerala and Goa, her
behaviour struck him as weird—she would often complain of headaches
and say she wasn’t well. This went on for the entire trip, and once
they got back home, she complained that he didn’t look after her.
She would use abusive words against his family, he says, and he
discovered that she had a history of taking anti-depressants. Then
came times when she started beating him up. When he went to the
police, they refused to believe him. “Last year on Diwali things
seemed better,” he says, “We did puja, bought new stuff and tried
to be normal. But it was not to be.” She went to his parents’
house, and, according to him, beat herself up and filed a case
against his entire family. They were put behind bars. “I will file
a divorce case soon,” Patil says, “She has not turned up for
counselling. I cannot keep waiting for her to take the first step
[towards a split]. Maybe I will use a private investigator now to
prove my claims.”
Lawyer
and author Shroff-Garg says that the use of private investigators to
bolster evidence in divorce cases is pretty common. And it is not as
invasive as people often imagine; detectives are hired for plenty of
reasons other than proving an extramartial affair. “It’s not as
if they are putting cameras in people’s bathrooms,” she says.
“Sometimes people ask for maintenance and say they are unemployed.
But that’s untrue. They may be working and lying about it.”
Prashant
Palekar, who runs Magnum Investigations, has been a detective for 15
years. He says that divorce cases are every investigator’s
mainstay. He gets a case every second day. “If a woman is asking
for alimony saying she doesn’t have a job, we get her salary slips.
We have people everywhere. We can get a contact inside her office. Or
we pose as loan advisors and say, ‘We will get you a loan…’.”
Divorce
espionage is not entirely devoid of cinematic scenes, though. Palekar
says he has had to follow targets to hotels and other love nests.
+++
In
common perception, Indian divorce laws favour women. Several lawyers
flatly deny this, but Deshmukh and Shroff-Garg say that it is true to
some extent. “In custody battles, sometimes the father is the
better parent. But Indian courts are designed to automatically rule
in favour of the mother. That should be changed. Fathers should not
be begging for visitation rights,” says Deshmukh. “And even men
can seek maintenance for the period of the divorce case,” says
Shroff-Garg, “Why shouldn’t they?”
More
often than not, says Shroff-Garg, divorce cases end in a wrangle over
money. “There are never black-and-white cases. It’s all grey. In
the end, it’s about buying your freedom. Either you pay money or
take money. It’s that simple.”
Source : Internet
No comments:
Post a Comment