USAID and UNIFEM support laws that violate Civil Liberties in India.
USAID, UNIFEM and Amnesty International have come out in support of laws in India that violate Civil Liberties of Men, Women and Children in India.
The Indian Domestic Violence Law Section 498a of Indian Penal Code(IPC), presumes the accused men and women to be guilty till proven innocent and the police can arrest and jail the accused without any warrant. In last 5 years, more than 160,000 women and 550,000 men were arrested or jailed in India under this law without trial of investigation. (News here)
USAID supports this law and opposes any amendments to it.
Amnesty International in this article justifes section 498a and says:
All laws are capable of and subject to abuse and misuse – including Section 498A. The solution does not lie in dismissing the law or taking away its teeth completely by making it compoundable and bailable. This is akin to throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
So, Amnesty International does no care if the teeth in the law bite innocent men, women or children. So, it would like to ignore Civil Liberties violation if the law is for women’s empowerment.
“Save Indian Family(SIF)” members had a detailed meeting with UNIFEM officials and yet UNIFEM carries on with its agenda in India ignoring Civil Liberties Violations.
The picture below show the domestic violence rates of Indian women across states, who completed 10 years of education, uneducated Indian women and American women. This survey is not done by “Save Indian Family(SIF)”, but done by US Bureau of Justice and USAID, United Nations only.
This picture clearly shows that India women who have completed schooling have much less chance of facing domestic violence compared to even American Women. However, 45% of uneducated women faced domestic violence at least once in life time. However, the programs by USAID and UNIFEM do not target uneducated women, who are almost always refused support by police, as police can not collect bribes from poor women. So, as the violence against these uneducated masses of women does not decrease, the jealous ideologues in advocacy groups use that as an excuse to demand more draconian laws, which give enoromous power of arbitrary arrests in the hands of police.
The foreign donors often do not care about the negative consequences of their short sighted thinking. It has been found that thousands of innocent women and even children are thrown inside jails due to these draconian domestic violence laws.
Stepmom names two-month-old in domestic violence/dowry demand case and Bail is applied for Baby.
Mumbai: In diapers, lying in her mother’s lap and yet to sprout teeth, but Zoya is an accused in a dowry harassment case. The two-month-old baby was named along with seven adults by her stepmother in a complaint letter to the police. What is worse is that the police has included the child’s name in the FIR [“First Information Report,” the Indian equivalent of a police report].
Zoya – who should be playing in crib – had to spend several hours in a police station with her mother, foregoing food and sleep and came very close to being arrested.
Her mother, Reshma Shamsuddin Khan, pleaded with the police. “(in Hindi Language)Sahab ye toh choti bacchi hai. Iska aapne kaise complaint le liye. Toh woh bole nai kuch problem nahin hai, hota hai saat-aath saal ke bachi ka bhi hamare paas case hai. Tab humney socha ke court jayenge. (Translation: I told them that she is a baby and how can you write her name in the FIR. The policemen said that it was no big deal and that they had other cases against young children too. That’s when we decided to go to court.”).
Police Drag 92-yr-old to Court
The officer in-charge of Bainsada police station had arrested Badan Devi (92), a widow, and her 40-year-old daughter Minatee of Ichhapur village on Saturday. The police action followed an FIR lodged by the woman’s daughter-in-law, Santilata. Police did not even bother to make special arrangements for the old woman. They virtually dragged the tottering “accused” to court along with other criminals.
Old couple lose house, blame misuse of dowry Act
The Supreme court has also ruled that a wife has access to the ‘household’ that she has ‘shared’ with her husband. This, however, is also being flouted. In fact, the ‘misuse’ of the Dowry Harassment Act is an open secret. Take the instance of Lucknow-based Asha Rani Agarwal and her husband, Gopal Chand Agarwal. The septuagenarian couple disowned their son and daughter-in-law in 2007 and severed contact with the couple owing to a family dispute. In 2008, however, the couple got entangled in a legal battle involving dowry harassment.
Interestingly, despite having no legal rights over the house and with the legal battle still on in court, the daughter-in-law has allegedly taken possession of the old couple’s home, thereby forcing them to take refuge in a local ‘dharamshala'(a community shelter).
India Supreme Court Bench: Dowry law is a shield, not an assassin’s weapon: court
“By misuse of the provision (Section 498A) a new legal terrorism can be unleashed. Merely because the provision is declared constitutional, it does not give license to unscrupulous persons to wreak personal vendetta.”
“The provision is intended to be used as a shield and not an assassin’s weapon.”
“In such cases acquittal of the accused does not wipe out the ignominy suffered during and prior to trial. Sometimes adverse media coverage adds to the misery”.
The Bench called upon the Legislature (Parliament) to find out ways of dealing with those who made frivolous complaints or allegations.
President of India, Mrs. Pratibha Patil on 26th Dec 2007, warns against the misuse of domestic violence legislation in India:
“Let me put in a word of caution and sage counsel. Empowerment does not mean setting women against men. Gender injustice cannot and should not be perceived as war or rivalry between the two sexes.”
“Instances exist whereby protective legal provisions for the benefit of women have been subjected to distortion and misuse to wreak petty vengeance and to settle scores. It is unfortunate if laws meant to protect women get abused as instruments of oppression.”
US State Department (Travel Warning during 2005-2007):
(now the warning is removed)
The U.S. State Department carried a Travel warning for many years on Indian domestic violence and anti-dowry laws in India.
The warning said:
“A number of U.S. citizen men who have come to India to marry Indian nationals have been arrested and charged with crimes related to dowry extraction. Many of the charges stem from the U.S. citizen’s inability to provide an immigrant visa for his prospective spouse to travel immediately to the United States.
“The courts sometimes order the U.S. citizen to pay large sums of money to his spouse in exchange for the dismissal of charges. The courts normally confiscate the American’s passport, and he must remain in India until the case has been settled.
Nearly 30 million cases pending in courts
Over three million cases are pending in India’s 21 high courts, and an astounding 26.3 million cases are pending in subordinate courts across the country.
The USAID report above makes an outrageous claim that 50 million women are battered in India by their husbands. If that is so and if men are only the aggressors and women are only victims, then why the suicide rates of men are increasing continuously since last 13 years? Every 9 minutes a married man is committing suicide.The suicide rates of married men is in fact rapidly rising where as the suicide rates of married women is almost constant.
People sitting inside USAID would like all of us to believe that men are evil and women are vulnerable damsels in distress. After so many religious riots in India, now do they wish a gender war? Civil Liberties Violations of millions of men, women and children and unleashing a gender war are crimes against humanity. Anger, Hate, intolerance and Radical Feminism can not solve women’s problems. All their social experiments in United States of America have failed. Today, one out of 4 teenage girls in US have Sexually Transmitted Diseases ( Link )and American Crime Rate is exactly double that of India. So, US does not have any moral authority to export the failed experiments into India.
Often, the problem of dowry demand from women is used as an excuse to justify these Controversial laws in India. However, the Government of India loves people spending in marriages as it boosts the economy. Indian women are the largest consumers of Gold in the World.
It has been found that the Indian Ministry for Women and Children has spent ZERO Money for media campaign against dowry taking or giving.
The same Minister sits with USAID and UNIFEM officials to discuss about women’s issues. The double standards are just there out in open.
