Rethinking Law and Violence: The Domestic Violence (Prevention) Bill in India, 2002

This essay focuses on the controversy generated by recent proposed legislation on domestic violence in India. An alternative draft bill on domestic violence prepared by the feminist legal NGO, the Lawyers’ Collective, and supported by women's groups nationally, includes a demand that victims of domestic violence (usually wives) be permitted by law to continue to occupy the domestic home, a demand that the Government bill has refused to include. This demand is theoretically informed by a politics of space. Bodies and space are linked, to the extent that each is an abstraction without the concept of the other to ground it. The feminist legal proposal challenges property‐as‐absolute‐(male) ownership by conceptualising the household as, instead, shared domestic space. The proposal does not dissimulate common sense – it is conscious of being radical, in part at least because it demystifies the ‘domestic’ as an ideological construct and offers it instead realistically and minimally as simply an alternative to destitution. The recognition that there are no support structures for dependant women outside the family (such as, for example, state‐sponsored welfare institutions), so that destitution can be both sudden and real for women of any class and circumstances, has led to the conceptualisation of a law that formulates a right to shared space as one that makes no claim to shared ownership – while at the same time questioning the other's absolute property right. Despite the limited nature of the claim it makes, this proposal has been viewed as threatening by Indian law‐makers.