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Act won't hit good hubbies: Renuka
Published on Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 20:39, Updated on Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 07:45 in India section
Tags: Devils Advocate, Karan Thapar , Karan Thapar
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Karan Thapar: Hello and welcome to Devil’s Advocate. Will the UPA Government’s Domestic Violence Bill convert innocent husbands into offenders and criminals, and worse, will it empower motivated women to act viciously and get away with it? Those are the two key issues I should raise in an exclusive interview with the Minister for Women and Child Development, Renuka Chowdhury.
Ms Chowdhury, let’s start with the definitions under this Act, which are so wide that they are worrying. To begin with, there is the whole question of what the Act means by domestic violence - it covers verbal abuse, emotional abuse, economic abuse and anything that tends towards them. I put it to you, that’s so wide as to be either meaningless or dangerously self-embracing.
Renuka Chowdhury: I don’t know why you have to see it in two extremes. Why have you not ever noticed that women live in dangerously self-embracing situations? That it’s none of this, even if you see it as porosity in the Act or that the ambit is too wide. Please understand that women are burnt to death, beaten to insensibilities.
Karan Thapar:But the cure is not imprecision, the cure is not vagueness of legislation.
Renuka Chowdhury:Absolutely.
Karan Thapar:Let me explain why this Act is imprecise. For instance, emotional and verbal abuses are defined to include insults and ridicule. That means you can’t be sarcastic to your wife, it means you can’t call you brother-in-law an ass or a mother-in-law a nag even if both are those are correct. Surely, that’s a level of silliness, but it’s a part of your Bill.
Renuka Chowdhury: I want to tell you what you deem as silly is really not something that I have created today. Under the IPC section, speaking in a way that is denigrating to the status of women, which removes her from her dignity, is very much an Act under the IPC. So I don’t see what are you getting heated up about today.
Karan Thapar:But you are here interfering in normal conversation between two adults. As Soli Sorabjee writing in The Indian Express pointed out, you are reducing an important and serious issue to the level of silliness.
Renuka Chowdhury: I don’t think anything that happens to a women in the sense of her domestic violence can be termed as silly. It is over-trivialising and over-simplifying this Act. Please understand that despite all the checks, women are burnt, one in six women is raped, murdered, beaten to death, sent in to mental asylums. I don’t think that’s funny.
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URBANEYE
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Thank God for people like Renuka Choudhary. It was because of this law that my friend managed to escape her
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Its really sad that today Matrimony that was considered bliss has become an Akhada that is been played between wife
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It is better to leave the country to women and go for exile. I really wonder whether we are in
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For people like you we wish you get well soon.you need immediate medical attention.
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Dear Sir
The honourable minister seen to have come to a notion that all men are out there to harrass women.As
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