Overhaul the Maintenance Laws

To,

The Honorable Minister for Law and Justice
Dr M Veerapa Moily,
Ministry of Law & Justice,
4th Floor, A-Wing, Shastri Bhavan
New Delhi – 110 001.

Sub: Paying maintenance to qualified and empowered women for short marriages must be stopped with immediate effect.

Honorable Minister,

Ordering maintenance to a qualified woman voluntarily incapacitating herself after a short marriage just to extract money from her husband is a nothing but a judicially imposed system of involuntary servitude wherein one human being is placed within the bondage to another one as long as the maintenance term is ordered. I feel that it is every husband’s responsibility to provide for child support however paying maintenance to qualified women in childless marriages who voluntarily incapacitate themselves must be stopped outright.

The current condition of Indian Women

No matter how much the women’s organizations and women’s ministry want to fictionalize to the world the sorry state of Indian women the reality is however quite the opposite. India has undergone a sea change as far as the empowerment and earning potential of women are concerned. Women now dominate many fields like Call Centers, BPO’s, Advertising and Media. Women get equal opportunities at workplace and are better educated than men because the cost of educating girls in India is far less than cost of educating boys. Women get free education and also pay less tax for the same amount of salary earned as compared to a man. Delhi recently registered more female births than male births effectively killing the India female feticide agenda that was drummed around so far. Women have special trains and busses for them to make commuting to and from their workplaces easy. They also enjoy reservations at various levels of the government including the now historical recommendation of reserving 33% of all seats in the parliament for women. The percentage of reservation for women has now been increased to as high as 50% in some cases. While women contribute only 18% of the country’s taxes the Indian government spends over Rs 6800 crores on them annually under the various different heads. Women have a have a fully functional cabinet ministry and a National Commission for women working just for their needs. Women have over 15 marital laws to protect themselves including about 5 different laws to get maintenance from their husbands. The misuse statistics of the Anti Dowry law (IPC 498A) and the Domestic Violence Act of 2005 has been widely known now the world over and is not presented in this letter.

Indian Maintenance laws for women

Divorce and Maintenance laws in India were created when the majority of women in India were illiterate and no means to earn a living and were totally dependent on their fathers, brothers or husbands for their livelihood. Maintenance laws had the noble intention of ordering the husband to provide separate livelihood expenses for his wife of many years his children whom he had fathered so that the wife who had never worked before or was uneducated could provide for herself and her children and elk out a decent living.

The current reality in Indian family courts is however is shocking. Extracting maintenance is becoming a cause of a Marriage for many women and not an outcome of a unfortunate divorce. Women marry so that they can extract money through the various maintenance laws many times filing simultaneous maintenance cases under various sections. Indian women have access to as many as 5 different laws to get maintenance from their husbands.

Out of these 5 laws only one law is gender neutral, the rest of then can only be used by women against their husbands.

Qualified Women Extracting Maintenance – A Modern Menace

A visit to a family court in any of the metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Bangalore will reveal a shocking reality that in almost all divorce cases high maintenance is demanded by women in even marriages as which are short as 2 months or 6 months. The educated and empowered women in these cases are all very qualified, the minimum qualification being a graduate degree. A large number of women are highly qualified engineers, doctors or IT professionals. These qualified women still demand maintenance stating the fact the it is the responsibility of the husband to provide for the maintenance of these women as they were maintained during their very short marriage. These women at first voluntarily incapacitate themselves and then demands astronomical amounts of maintenance. The various different ways that money is extracted is highlighted below.

In the HMA 24 case of Smt Mamta Jaisawal vs Rajesh Jaiswal the where was qualified wife had voluntary incapacitated was demanding maintenance from her husband Honorable Madhya Pradesh High court stated the below.

“In view of this, the question arises as to in what way Section 24 of the Act has to be interpreted. Whether a spouse who has capacity of earning but chooses to remain idle, should be permitted to saddle other spouse with his or her expenditure? Whether such spouse should be permitted to get pendente life alimony at higher rate from other spouse in such condition? According to me, Section 24 has been enacted for the purpose of providing a monetary assistance to such spouse who is incapable of supporting himself or herself in spite of sincere efforts made by him or herself. A spouse who is well qualified to get the service immediately with less effort is not expected to remain idle to squeeze out, to milk out the other spouse by relieving him of his or her own purse by a cut in the nature of pendente life alimony. The law does not expect the increasing number of such idle persons who by remaining in the arena of legal battles, try to squeeze out the adversary by implementing the provisions of law suitable to their purpose.”

“In fact, well qualified spouses desirous of remaining idle, not making efforts for the purpose of finding out a source of livelihood, have to be discouraged, if the society wants to progress. The spouses who are quarrelling and coming to the Court in respect of matrimonial disputes, have to be guided for the purpose of amicable settlement as early as possible and, therefore, grant of luxurious, excessive facilities by way of pendente lite alimony and extra expenditure has to be discouraged.”

In spite of having such sensible judgments the courts in India regularly grant maintenance to qualified women who prefer to incapacitate themselves at their parents’ home and demand that their husbands keep them in the same standard as during the marriage. The courts never question the motive of these women not earn a living for themselves and still rely on the centuries old tradition that the husband must maintain the wife come what may. A woman no matter qualified, no matter how short her marriage and no matter how much her contribution to the marriage is more or less guaranteed to get maintenance in India if she petitions for it.

Recommendations

A marriage must not be made a way for qualified unscrupulous women to profit. Breaking a marriage must never be made monetarily lucrative, as it has been made in India today. Today qualified Indian women stand to gain a lot my marrying and then quickly breaking marriages and thereafter immediately demanding huge maintenance and alimonies. Maintenance must be based on genuine need and not greed of a woman. Today however the practice and the urge to get maintenance through multiple maintenance laws has because the cause of breaking marriages and extracting money. The government must make the maintenance laws stringent so that while parties (either husband or wife) who are truly needy can take relief under this section, the unscrupulous ones who sole intention to extract maintenance from the husband can be punished.

Thanking you,

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