Mumbai: Domestic violence act doesn’t mandate that parties should share household, says magistrate court

A sessions court set aside a magistrate’s order which discharged a domestic violence victim’s brother-in-law as he did not live in the same household with the couple. The court said the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act nowhere mandates that an aggrieved person can seek relief only against persons who have shared a household with her.

Calling the observation by the magistrate ‘wholly misplaced’, the court said the Act makes it clear that the woman can file a complaint against any relative of the husband. Additional Sessions Judge UM Padwad stated in the order, “The Act nowhere mandates that an aggrieved person can seek relief only against the persons who have shared a household with her.” The court reasoned that had it been so, it would have been very convenient to cause violence or any other trouble to the woman through the relatives not sharing the household and yet remain out of the clutches of the law.

It said such an approach would amount to giving a licence to those relatives not sharing a household to commit violence on the woman, rendering the DV Act meaningless. “That just cannot be and certainly was not the intention while enacting the said statute,” Judge Padwad stated.

The court said there are sufficient references to show that the brother-in-law was also a party to the domestic violence. The woman was married to her husband, a journalist in 2008. The couple had a son in 2010. She had approached the sessions court against the order of the magistrate who had stated that she could not claim reliefs under the DV Act from her brother-in-law whom she had made a respondent along with her husband. She had claimed that they had both committed domestic violence on her. The magistrate had held that the brother-in-law had never shared a household with the couple and hence could not be made a respondent under the Act.