Unmade in heaven

One of these was a 34-year-old homemaker living in a cramped flat in south Delhi with three children, aged 15, 10 and 5. Every night, the children rushed to protect their mother from their father’s physical onslaughts. For in his nightly drunken stupor, the man would try to strangle her or beat her head against the wall. After years of suffering silently, when she eventually tried to file for divorce, she discovered that she was up against a formidable law which did not recognise physical torture as a ground for divorce. She was trapped in her miserable situation.

When I met her, she broke down and cried, “Why does the law bind you to drag a relationship like this on? I feel as though I have a mountain on my head.” There was nothing I could say or do to comfort her. Except write about her plight.

Later I realised that there were many more women like her. The Madras High Court daily received as many as 20-30 divorce petitions from Christian women. In the Capital, though, a lawyer confessed that although at least six women visited him with divorce pleas every year, he had succeeded in taking up only five cases in the last 40 years, because as he put it, “their cases will not stand under the present law. The Act is total madness.”

A seasoned divorce lawyer recounted the case of a Christian couple who were temperamentally poles apart, and lived their separate lives in the same house for 26 years without exchanging a single word. They were forced to suffer each other till death did them apart, for they had no grounds for divorce. Strangely the archaic law actually promoted dishonesty and corruption, for as lawyers revealed, Christian women could get a divorce only by “creating” a false case. As a Supreme court lawyer explained the irony: “You have to trump up a false case of adultery, write letters from the co-respondent to the adulterer, sometimes you have to cook up a man as well.” Something which not all upright women can allow themselves to do. But as another lawyer shrugged, “You have to make a choice between suffering lies and suffering each other.”

Even at that time, hundreds of women were desperately awaiting and praying for a change in the law. Yet predictably, every time women activists raised their voices for reform, they were confronted by religious forces. I spoke to the then deputy secretary general of the Catholic Bishops Conference. His statements amazed me: “Nothing which happens after your marriage invalidates it, however extreme the provocation.” And he went on to elucidate his point: “The problem with divorce is the right of re-marriage. Jesus Christ does not permit this. If you marry again, it will be concubinage.” When I asked him about the differences between civil and canon law, and how the former unlike the latter recognises adultery as a ground for divorce, he retorted: “Seventy per cent of men living abroad are adulterous. If we recognise adultery as a ground for divorce, do you know how many marriages will break down?” I could not even react to his outrageous statement.