Kicking in for the daughter-in-law Where are heading in the 21sr century? India, the country of love,
passion, and forgiveness is showing the world that the country is forwarding with impunity to those who treat their daughter-in-laws as animals. Today, even the animals are protected from the abuse of human beings by laws.
The apex Court of the country is highest echelon, where the last hope of justice stands. The
Supreme Court judges S. B. Sinha and Cyriac Joseph have opened the Pandora’s Box by giving a judgment that kicking a daughter-in-law is not tantamount to ‘cruelty’. If that is not a cruelty, then what it is, the judges should have pronounced. Isn’t it a judgment that would encourage the trigger-happy scores of in-laws in this huge illiterate populated country? Why illiterates only, the literate people too get the wrong message form this judgment.
If the kicking of the daughter-in-law were not cruelty, then the kicking of the father-in-law, mother-in-law, husband, and all other in-laws by the daughter-in-laws also would not be tantamount to cruelty. What is your say, the judges?
The section 498-A of the Indian penal code deals with the cruelty on in-laws. Is there any provision that kicking is not cruelty in that section?
Educated people sometimes behave in strange manners. Judges in the professional levels should take matter very seriously and sincerely to make their judgments unbiased irrespective of the person / persons they are judging.
Human rights activists in the country have protested against this judgment. They fear that the judgment may give a license to those people indulging in this practice. Brinda Karat, the Communist Party leader, has rightly questioned the merit of this judgment and phrased it as retrograde.
Kicking human beings is an offence at any count, except for defending the self from unsocial elements. But, in India, kicking a book, any reading material, or even some inanimate objects too is considered a sign of disrespect to either the God, Goddess, or human beings who owns those objects. Strange it is that India is! now kicking a human being is considered no matter.