SOCIAL ACTION FORUM FOR MANAV ADHIKAR AND ANOTHER Vs. UNION OF INDIA MINISTRY OF LAW AND JUSTICE AND OTHERS

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Law, especially the criminal law, intends to control, if not altogether remove, the malady that gets into the spine of the society and gradually corrodes the marrows of the vertebrae of a large section of the society. A situation arises and the legislature, expressing its concern and responsibility, adds a new penal provision with the intention to achieve the requisite result. When a sensitive legal provision is brought into the statute book, the victims of the crime feel adequately safe, and if the said provision pertains to matrimonial sphere, both the parties, namely, wife and husband or any one from the side of the husband is booked for the offence and both the sides play the victim card. The accused persons, while asserting as victims, exposit grave concern and the situation of harassment is built with enormous anxiety and accentuated vigour. It is propounded in a court of law that the penal provision is abused to an unimaginable extent, for in a cruel, ruthless and totally revengeful manner, the young, old and relatives residing at distant places having no involvement with the incident, if any, are roped in. Thus, the abuse of the penal provision has vertically risen. When the implementation of law is abused by the law enforcing agency, the legislature introduces a protective provision as regards arrest. Needless to say, the courts have ample power to grant pre-arrest bail or popularly called anticipatory bail and even to quash the criminal proceeding totally to stabilize the lawful balance because no court of law remotely conceives of a war between the two sexes. The courts remain constantly alive to the situation that though no war takes place, yet neither anger nor vendetta of the aggrieved section should take an advantage of the legal provision and harass the other side with influence or espousing the principle of sympathy. The role of the law enforcing agency or the prosecuting agency is sometimes coloured with superlative empathy being totally oblivious of the sensation to make maladroit efforts to compete with the game of super sensitivity. Such a situation brings in a social disaster that has the potentiality to vertically divide the society. The sense of sensitivity and the study of social phenomenon are required to be understood with objectivity. In such a situation, it is obligatory on the part of the legislature to bring in protective adjective law and the duty of the constitutional courts to perceive and scrutinize the protective measure so that the social menace is curbed. We are, in the instant matters, focussing on Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (for short, 'the IPC').

(2.) Section 498-A was brought into the statute book in the year 1983. The objects and reasons for introducing Section 498-A IPC can be gathered from the Statement of Objects and Reasons of Criminal Law (Second Amendment) Act of 1983 and read as under:-

(3.) Regarding the constitutionality of Section 498-A IPC, in Sushil Kumar Sharma v. Union of India and others, (2005) 6 SCC 281 : AIR 2005 SC 3100, it was held by the Supreme Court:-