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The Supreme Court in Arnesh Kumar vs State Of Bihar & Anr said women were increasingly using the anti-dowry law to harass in-laws and restrained police from mechanically arresting the husband and his relatives on mere lodging of a complaint under Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code.

Citing very low conviction rate in such cases, it directed the state governments to instruct police “not to automatically arrest when a case under Section 498A of IPC is registered but to satisfy themselves about the necessity for arrest under the parameters (check list) provided under Section 41 of Criminal Procedure Code“.

Section 41 lays down a nine-point check list police to weigh the need to arrest after examining the conduct of the accused, including possibility of his absconding.

If police arrested the accused, “the magistrate, while authorizing detention of the accused shall peruse the report furnished by the police officer in terms of Section 41 and only after recording its satisfaction…will authorize detention,“ the bench bench of Justices C K Prasad and P C Ghose said. It also said that this checklist for arrest and detention would apply to all offences, which are punished with a prison term less than 7 years. Punishment under Section 498A is a maximum of three years but it had been made a cognizable and nonbailable offence, which made grant of bail to the accused a rarity in courts.

But the court singled out the dowry harassment cases as the most abused and misused provision, though the legislature had enacted it with the laudable object to prevent harassment of women in matrimonial homes.

Writing the judgment for the bench, Justice Prasad said there had been a phenomenal increase in dowry harassment cases in India in the last few years. “The fact that Section 498A is a cognizable and non-bailable offence has lent it a dubious place of pride amongst the provisions that are used as weapons rather than shield by disgruntled wives,” he said.

“The simplest way to harass is to get the husband and his relatives arrested under this provision. In a quite number of cases, bed-ridden grand-fathers and grandmothers of the husbands, their sisters living abroad for decades are arrested,” he said.

or long now, concerns have been expressed about stringent anti-dowry laws being misused by some women to harass or blackmail their in-laws. These apprehensions have not only been expressed by courts, women’s activists too have acknowledged that such misuse is not unknown. It was, therefore, necessary for the law to take this reality into account.

The apex court’s order does just that. Automatic arrest was one of the provisions that lent itself most to abuse and making it mandatory for a magistrate to sanction arrest should help curb this abuse of law. Beyond that, there’s a lesson for all of us – social ills can’t be eliminated just by enacting laws, as India tends to do. Society as a whole needs to join the movement against them.

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