Mental illness, a ruse for divorce
Lawyers claim divorce on grounds of mental illness of wife is on the rise in state
By : k.k. abdul rahoof
Update: 2015-11-03 03:03 GMT
HYDERABAD: The dreams that 34-year-old primary school teacher and housewife Smitha (name changed) wove fell apart when she found some 10 years after marriage that her husband was having an extra-marital affair.
With constant fights at home and the resultant stress, an exhausted Smitha fell ill. Her husband took her to a doctor known to him, and some medicines were prescribed. Later, it turned out that the medicines she was given were for schizophrenia and that the doctor was a psychiatrist; not a general physician.
A month after Smitha started taking the medicines, her husband filed a divorce petition with a local court, saying that she was mentally challenged and that her parents had concealed the matter from him. He also sought custody of the six-year-old child they had, by pressing the argument that the child would not be safe with its mother.
Like several other women in TS and elsewhere, Smitha fell victim to a common trick used by men to facilitate a divorce. Smitha and her lawyer are hoping against hope that the court will not buy the man’s claims as he does not have a strong medical evidence to prove her illness.
Lawyers from Hyderabad say that the most common reason cited by men in their divorce petitions is mental illness of their wives. This they do to avoid paying alimony and other compensation, get custody of children and keep the property with themselves. “In over 90 per cent cases I have come across, mental illness of wife is one of the reasons cited in petitions. Howe-ver, most of them only have oral claims and no medical evidence,” said advocate C. Radha Krishna, a lawyer from LB Nagar, who has been dealing with divorce cases for five years.
Advocate Manish D. Modak of Astrea Legal Associates said he had seen incidents in which men tried to fabricate evidence by taking their wives to psychiatrists without their consent before filing the divorce petition. While the total number of such cases is not available, lawyers say a large number of women fall victims to such tricks.
“The women suffer a lot due to the false allegations. What will they have if they are divorced on the grounds of insanity,” said human rights lawyer Gulam Rabbani.
6,300 cases filed against husbands:
Cases of dowry harassment and domestic violence are so rampant in Telangana that in just one year, the state police booked over 6,300 cases against husbands and relatives. While men’s rights activists maintain that Section 498A (dowry harassment and domestic violence) has been increasingly exploited by women to extort money from men, fact is that defence lawyers often accuse women petitioners of having mental illness. When the parties fail to settle the matter, the case gets dragged for so long that it becomes another traumatic experience for the already harried victims.
According to prominent lawyers, in several cases, woman petitioners in dowry harassment cases have been charged with having mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. “It’s common that the woman filing a complaint against cruelty of her husband is accused of having mental problems. Defence lawyers use this as an easy way out for their clients to win the case,” said human rights lawyer Gulam Rabbani.
If convicted, the punishment for dowry harassment cases is three years’ imprisonment along with fine. “In my experience, when a domestic violence case-accused meets his lawyer, the first conversation they are likely to have is how to portray the complainant as a mentally challenged person,” said another lawyer from the city.