Supreme Court: Plugging Loopholes In The Dowry Law
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
View all posts by this Author
By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2021-06-01 08:02:11
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.
View all posts by this Author
The Supreme Court has, although belatedly, plugged a loophole in section 304B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) that allowed the accused in a dowry case to wriggle out of getting convicted by using certain words in the section to their advantage.
Section 304B says that "where the death of a woman is caused by any burns or bodily injury or occurs otherwise than under normal circumstances within seven years of her marriage and it is shown that soon before her death, she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband or any relative of her husband for, or in connection with, any demand for dowry, such death shall be called 'dowry death' and such husband or relative shall be deemed to have caused her death". This section was inserted in 1986 and is commonly known as the dowry law.
But the words "soon before" in the section have been regularly misused by accused person or persons and also variously interpreted by the judiciary to allow a huge escape route to such accused person or persons. There is often a gap between the time a married woman dies unnaturally due to cruelty or harassment and the time when she is subjected to such cruelty or harassment. This is for the simple reason that those who subject her to cruelty or harassment for dowry often wait to see if their methods produce results and if the woman's family meets their demand. The actual death, or killing, might happen after the tormentors feel their demands are not going to be met.
This time gap and the wording in the section were being used by some accused persons to their advantage. They were pleading in court that the woman was not subjected to any such cruelty or harassment for, say, the last six months. That was enough for some judges, who went for a technical interpretation of the section, to let them off as there was no cruelty or harassment "soon before" her death and since there was no clear definition of "soon before", six months seemed a distant time to them.
Noting that dowry deaths caused nearly 40-45% of homicidal death of women in India and that 7115 cases were registered in 2019 under section 304B, the court said that a strict interpretation of the section "would defeat the very object for which it was enacted". Hence, the bench said that "the phrase 'soon before' appearing in section 304B cannot be construed to mean 'immediately before'. The prosecution must establish the existence of 'proximate and live link' between the dowry death and cruelty or harassment for dowry demand by the husband or his relatives". The Supreme Court then went on to advise trial courts not to take a strait-jacketed approach to section 304B in terming deaths as homicidal, suicidal or accidental. It tightened the procedure to be adopted by trial courts in deciding dowry deaths, including confronting the accused with evidence.
