Recently, the Allahabad High Court, while allowing two criminal revisions pertaining to a dowry case, took cognisance of the misuse of Section 498A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), proposed certain safeguards and directed the State authorities of Uttar Pradesh to take the necessary steps for their implementation in a given time period. The High Court expressed its concern over the growing tendency of dowry victims to rope in the husband and all his family members using general and sweeping allegations.
The directions, inter alia, include constitution of a family welfare committee in each district under the District Legal Services Authority (DLSA), handing over the first information report to such a committee immediately after its registration, and no arrest to be made by the police during this “cooling period’ of two months. As far as the High Court judgment reads, there were no allegations against the police that had dropped charges against two persons for lack of evidence and charge-sheeted only the husband and his parents based on available evidence.
Strangely enough, the High Court specifically mentioned in its judgment of taking guidance from the judgment of the Supreme Court of India in Social Action Forum for Manav Adhikar vs Union of India (2018), a case in which the Supreme Court overturned the judgment of its two-judge Bench and held constitution of similar committees and an embargo on arrest by the police for one month till the submission of report by the family welfare committee, impermissible under the scheme of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) ( Rajesh Sharma vs The State of U.P., 2017). Both Court judgments also dealt with the growing misuse of dowry provisions.
