26

Sep

Which category are wives under the Reservation Bill?

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New Delhi, 26, September 2023

A judgment of Justice Sanjay Dwivedi delivered two days back grants anticipatory bail to Singhar a former Minister in 2022 whose second wife accused him of cruelty, obscenity and most important having unnatural sex with her.

Amitabh Srivastava

Among the sounds of conch shells on the historic unanimous passage of the Women Reservation comes a shrieking voice from Madhya Pradesh High Court which raises questions about the status of married women in the Indian society reservation or no reservation.

A judgment of Justice Sanjay Dwivedi delivered two days back grants anticipatory bail to Singhar a former Minister in 2022 whose second wife accused him of cruelty, obscenity and most important having unnatural sex with her.

The Judge in his judgement stated that offence under Section 377 (unnatural sex) does not apply in this case because "relationship between husband and wife is not just for procreation. Secondly, there is no question of consent between husband and wife if she is above18 Section 375 (2) of IPC.

The Minister had earlier been denied bail by the Indore Court but the Madhya Pradesh High Court has clearly stated that if this is not an offence under 375 how does it become an offence under 377?

He has also stated that there is nothing like 'unnatural' sex now.

It seems he has taken for granted that the newly introduced Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita Bill 2023 has already become law even though the three new laws have to be sent to the Standing Committee for amendments and final approval.

Aishwarya Sinha a young lawyer in Delhi tells Media Map that the Nyaya Sanhita Bill has no mention of the so called unnatural sex but the law has yet to be implemented by Parliament.

She said the only option before the wife now is to appeal under Section 498 A on grounds of cruelty if she was forced to have sex against her consent.

Ashish Kumar, another prominent lawyer said that this was a bad judgment because whether Marital Rape has officially become law or not consent of the wife cannot be ignored.

As for 377 he argues,"It is not about unnatural sex alone but about any kind of sex which is not for procreation. Sex with animals is about bestiality and that is a totally different issue. But in my view consent of a wife is the most important issue. We are not living in the 19 th century when the CrPC  was made, to argue that marriage automatically means you can take the wife consent for granted."

As I have been writing for a long time, the so-called elite and vocal women MPs of the BJP specially Smriti Irani, Maneka Gandhi and Meenakshi Lekhi (herself a lawyer) have not take a stand when the issue of criminalising marital rape was raised in Parliament or the Supreme Court.

Their staple argument is that if Marital Rape is criminalised in India most Indian families would break up. That itself is a huge admission of guilt but should society suffer because the MPs are too worried about the sanctity of the Indian marriage and not about the status of the silent suffering wives, many of whom had been married when they were minors.

The issue was argued in the Delhi High for days together and finally referred to the Supreme Court. However the Attorney General Tushar Mehta refused to spell out the government stand saying that all stakeholders will have to be consulted on this very critical issue.

Fast forward to 2023 September.

The Government has told the country clearly that the Women Reservation Bill will come into effect by 2029 after a delimitation exercise has been carried out. That gives us time to celebrate the unanimous passage of the Nari Shakti Vandan Bill for the next six years across the globe. The first celebration was started by none other than our Prime Minister in his constituency Varanasi on September 23.

Discussions on the reservation of seats for the SC/ST and the sadly missed out OBCs have begun in right earnest and we will hear more of this before the 2024 elections, unless they are pre-poned.

Mahua Moitra, the vocal MP from TMC in an interview to BBC took pot-shots at the government for delaying tactics.

"They did not conduct a census when they imposed a blanket ban on cow slaughter. Are women worse than cows that you are going to conduct a country wise survey and delimitation exercise before making it a law" she asked.

The laws is changing so fast that not everyone cant keep pace with it.

In 2018, the Punjab and Haryana High Court had ruled that unnatural sex could be a ground for divorce.

In 2020 there was an OTT series starring Pankaj Tripathi which showed a 15 year old girl giving evidence in court that her lawyer father subjected her mother to torture and blackmail in the day so that at night he could tell her "Chal Ab Kutti Ban Ja" exactly what this wife of the ex minister in Madhya Pradesh is complaining about. In the OTT version the Judge absolves the wife of the murder charge.

But for Judges and lawyers we spoke too this is a non-issue as we are living in 2023 and we have obviously moved forward.

Says Supreme Court lawyer Shashank Shekhar," I don't know how Section 377 is relevant in this case. Sex with animals is defined as unnatural sex but not in animal like position. If we are permitting consensual sex, deprivation of sex with a wife can become a ground for divorce."

Obviously these self obsessed and black mailing species called wives don't watch TV where our

Prime Minister gives a guarantee a la Arvind Kejriwal that within five years India would be among the top three economies of the world.

With such lofty narrative that is taking the country by storm who cares for a few frustrated wives complaining about their personal issues and that with a legally wedded Pati Parmeshwar? How dare they become impediments in the progress of the country?

They could easily be seen as anti-national in this fast forward moving country that is Bharat.

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