‘Staying Alive’: Celebrating 20 years of the DV Act | A Curator’s Note

IT WAS AUGUST TWENTY YEARS AGO when Ms Indira Jaising, Tenzing Choesang and I sat in the Parliament gallery, watching the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (‘PWDVA’) being brought to life. We couldn’t carry anything in with us except the pass, which I wish I had preserved. There were strict standards of conduct for us—at one point we were even told not to breathe too loudly. These rules contrasted sharply with what transpired in the hallowed halls below.

What has stayed with me from the debates that followed is that there was no real disagreement on the need for the PWDVA. Yes, there were apprehensions—about the law legitimising “live-in relationships” or its broad coverage being “misused,” a word in currency then (and still). The consensus was remarkable, especially given that a 2001 draft by the previous government had been deeply regressive—fraught with narrow definitions and even exempting violent conduct “for the respondent’s own protection or for the protection of his or another’s property.”

That consensus was the result of a near decade long campaign for the law, which led to its inclusion in the Common Minimum Programme of the UPA government. The women’s movement had already won important reforms on violence against women, including the Indian Penal Code amendments on dowry-related deaths and cruelty within marriage. However, these were criminal law provisions. Civil remedies for women facing violence at home were limited. And the special criminal law provisions applied only to matrimonial relationships, excluding others. The campaign for a civil law on domestic violence was built on the successes of the women’s movement in law reform and leveraged the groundswell of voices and experiences it had already brought to the fore.

Another feature of the PWDVA that makes it stand out is the way it indigenised international standards and practices to meet the specific requirements of the Indian context. To address what Ms Jaising evocatively termed the “civil death” of women attempting to leave violent relationships, the PWDVA is among the few laws worldwide that is primarily civil in nature, aimed at providing temporary emergency reliefs to give women a safe space to consider long-term decisions. Most significantly, it recognised a woman’s right to reside in a shared household to prevent her dispossession—something that, as the legal aid cases handled by the Lawyers Collective* showed, happened frequently in domestic violence cases, especially when women attempted to file criminal complaints.