A few weeks ago, yesteryear superstar and current Instagram sensation, Zeenat Aman, posted a photo of herself in a hospital gown. She was at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital, she wrote in the caption. “There has been an elephant in the room with me for the past 40 years. It is time to show this elephant the door,” she said.
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Zeenat was referring to her medical condition, ptosis, which causes her right eyelid to droop over the eye. She called the condition the result of an injury she suffered many decades ago. Even while talking about the elephant in the room, clearly, Zeenat could not talk about the elephant in the room. It is public knowledge that the injury she was referring to was caused when she was violently beaten up by a former co-star.
Last week, Nawaz Modi Singhania, wife of Raymond Group owner, Gautam Singhania, talked about the elephant in her room. In a video that has since gone viral, Nawaz is seen squatting at the gate of JK Gram, a Singhania property, while security personnel refuse her entry. In a subsequent interview, she said that relations with her husband broke down after September 10, when “Gautam beat up, smashed up, kicked, and punched his minor daughter Niharika and myself for something which felt like about 15 minutes... unrelentingly”.
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He then left the scene of attack and disappeared, she said, and she suspected he had gone to fetch his guns or weapons. Nawaz’s back was severely injured because her husband flung her around the room several times. With the support of her influential friends, most notably the Ambanis, Nawaz filed a non-cognisable offence report against her husband. A journalist asked her, why go this far and not file an FIR? An FIR would have been converted into a Domestic Violence report, Nawaz explains, the offender gets three years of “rigorous imprisonment and hard labour, the new domestic violence rules are so much more pro-victim than they used to be”. She was trying to save the unsaveable, she said. At this point, the elephant had clearly re-entered the room.
Under-reporting continues
Zeenat and Nawaz’s accounts not only demonstrate that domestic violence is a great leveller, but, tragically, also highlight that it is still somewhat of a taboo for the victim to talk about it, much less seek justice for it. The National Family Health Survey 2019-2021, which was published earlier this year, revealed that 29.3% of married women between the ages of 18 and 49 experienced domestic violence. That is one in three married women.
Yet, in 2021, only 507 cases were registered under the Protection of Women From Domestic Violence Act, 2005. (In comparison, over 1,36,000 cases were registered under Section 498A IPC, which deals with cruelty by husband or his relatives.) There are multiple reasons for under-reporting domestic violence and each of them is grim. The threat of retaliation is high and victims who have no place to go are terrified that reporting the crime will only result in further violence targeted at them.
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Women’s participation in the labour force continues to be low in India, at around 23%, and without financial independence, victims are forever trapped in violent home situations. Around a decade ago, I wrote a book about the Indian mother-in-law and was surprised to find that even in middle-class families, one of the first diktats given to the future daughter-in-law is that she should quit her job. This argument is couched as privilege: “We are financially well enough to not have our daughter-in-law work”; but what it ensures is that the daughter-in-law has no means to leave the marriage.
Seemingly, on the surface, a lot appears to have improved for Indian women in the last decade, but if you look closely, it is clear not much has. In fact, women’s participation in the labour force is the same today as it was 10 years ago. In the interim, it dipped to 21%.
Climate change and crime
Even as the drumbeat of development continues, as far as domestic violence goes, the situation is unlikely to improve in the foreseeable future. Every setback to humankind acts as an instigator of more violence. The pandemic years reported a significant spike, and now climate change is expected to spur it further on. A study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that rising temperatures are associated with a rise in violence against women. It suggested that a 1° increase in temperature is likely to lead to a rise of more than 6.3% in instances of domestic violence across India, Pakistan and Nepal.
While the brunt of this will be borne by women in poorer communities, the stories of Nawaz and Zeenat show that it will not be restricted to them. The vulnerabilities are widespread. And if even the richest and most famous wives continue to be unable to address the elephant in the room, what hope is there for anyone else?
The writer is the author of ‘Independence Day: A People’s History’.