While granting divorce to a Karnataka based couple, the Supreme Court, the highest authority of the country, made some serious observations. Here is an open letter from a modern Indian woman who questions the statements made by the court.
"A Hindu son can divorce his wife for the cruelty of trying to pry him away from his 'pious obligation' to live with his aged parents and provide shelter to them. A son, brought up and given education by his parents, has a moral and legal obligation to take care and maintain the parents, when they become old and when they have either no income or have a meager income."
First of all, cruelty means causing physical or mental harm to another, intentionally or not. If its cruelty to separate a son from his parents, aged or otherwise, why is it said to be a wife (daughter)’s duty to leave hers after her marriage? In urban India, boys and girls have been educated and brought up the same. Parents want their children to be successful and independent individuals, whether a girl or a boy. So doesn’t that mean that a daughter has the same “moral and legal obligation to take care and maintain the parents”?
Why Beti Bachao Beti Padhao ? So now the question also arises as to why educate a girl, make her financially independent when she can’t even support her own parents when they need her. It’s not a very popular practice for a daughter to financially support her parents only because she now has responsibilities to her new home.
How we are even evolving if that’s the mentality that we still live with? A boy’s parents are aged and old and need him to take care of them but what about a girl’s parents? What about them who spend their entire life’s worth into getting the daughter married only to learn that they cannot depend on their daughter to take care of them financially or otherwise?
Well, this is the reason why society wants a boy child and kills a girl child.
“She becomes integral to and forms part of the family of the husband and normally without any justifiable strong reason, she would never insist that her husband should get separated from the family and live only with her”
Now we ask for the “justifiable reasons” as to why we are asked to leave our parents after marriage. For generations, women have followed the rituals and customs of adopting a new family, new ways of life and a new home, but we can’t complain. Now, when a husband is asked to do the same, the court wants the wife to state reasons. The judge also reinstates the ideology where even after so many years, women are second to a man. She is educated, independent, a bread winner and a woman with a voice, but when it comes to his parents, she is to be a dutiful and obedient ‘daughter-in-law’. According to Indian traditions, a girl leaving her family to live with her husband and his family is called “Marriage” but a man leaving his family to live with his wife is ground for Divorce. Where is the equality in this???
A husband and a wife become one entity after marriage. They jointly look after the children, then why not do the same with their parents. It’s a moral duty of a couple to take care of both their parents, be it man or woman.