In 2020, the trend appears to be continuing. A total of 226 divorce applications were filed with the family court in the first 24 days of 2020. In 2018, there were 2,948 divorce applications filed, compared to 2,576 in 2017. Daily, 10 divorce-related cases are filed at the Kochi family court.
Marriage is a relationship in which two people commit to one other and work together for their mutual well-being, therefore raising children and forming an unbreakable bond. Human beings are unpredictably unpredictable since while marriage is a possibility, divorce is also a possibility. There was no statutory definition of the term “divorce,” although it may be described as the legal breakdown of judicial relationships created in marriages, thus divorce is a seven-letter phrase that separates a couple at their own request.
The term ‘Marriage’ refers to the relationship between male and female, according to RN Sharma’s definition of marriage which is no doubt one of the most appropriate definitions of a Hindu marriage, “a religious rite in which a man and a woman are permanently joined for the sake of dharma, reproduction, and sexual pleasure on a physical, social, and spiritual level”.
In 1955, Parliament passed the Hindu Code Bill, often known as the Hindu Marriage Act, to modify and codify Hindu marriage law. The Hindu Marriage Act covers anyone who is a Hindu by religion in any form or development, including Virashaiva, Lingayat, Brahmo, Prarthana, or Arya Samaj followers, as well as Buddhists, Jaina’s, and Sikhs, and anyone else domiciled in the Act’s jurisdiction who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi, or Jew by religion.
Ex: The first-ever recorded proof of marriage ceremonies uniting one female and one male date from approximately 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia and the earliest recognized records of India from two hundred BC to seven hundred AD. On 26th February 1869, the Indian Divorce act was passed, according to the preamble of this Act, it amends the law relating to the divorce of people professing Christianity. This is the sole codified legislation that governs Christian divorces.
The Indian Divorce (Amendment) Bill, 2001ACT NO. 51 OF 2001 [24th Sept 2001.] Bill allows Christian women to apply for divorce on grounds of cruelty, adultery, and has ceased to be Christian by conversion to another religion, etc. Based on the Law Commission’s recommendations, the Indian Divorce Act became law in 2012.
The Marriage Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2010 was introduced in parliament in 2012 to amend the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 and the Special Marriage Act, 1954 to make divorce easier because the marriage has irreversibly broken down. The Bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha in 2013, but could not be debated in the Lok Sabha. February 21st, 2019 An Act to alter the Divorce Act of 1869, the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act of 1939, the Special Marriage Act of 1954, The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955, and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act of 1956 are two laws that govern Hindu marriage.
The Supreme Court recently overturned the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955’s need for a six-month cooling period before divorcing. If there is no likelihood of cohabitation between the estranged couple, a trial court might now waive this term. Ex: According to History.com, the first recorded divorce in the American colonies was that of Anne Clarke and her husband Denis Clarke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony on January 5, 1643. The divorce was granted by the Quarter Court of Boston, MA because Denis Clarke abandoned his wife to be with another woman.
The motive or reason for implementing divorce as an act is to prevent women or men from violence, to make them understand their value, self-respect in which education plays one fact that educated people live a happier life than that vital role without education. Ex: According to the first case of divorce in the world, Anne Clarke and her husband Denis Clarke of Massachusetts, the basis of their divorce was his husband Denise Clark abandoned his wife to be with another woman, the reasons for the divorce were adultery and abandonment.
The bases of their divorce are reasonable it’s very obvious for Anne to give Denis Divorce. In the earlier time divorce was introduced as a relief for both parties by which they can fight for their rights and live a happy life without being a burden on each other. Some people blame education as the cause of divorce, some blame the feminist movement caused divorce rates to spike. According to The Hindu.com, the RSS Chief, Mohan Bhagwat, said, when addressing RSS members in Ahmedabad on February 15, 2020, he said, “Divorce is more common in educated and affluent households because with education and wealth comes arrogance, which forces families to fall apart.”
Deepti Aythan, advocate and founder of Ayathan Associates says that education has played a role in the increase in the number of divorces. “Personal space, freedom, and equality are all understood with knowledge. She says that marriage is no longer viewed as taking specific responsibilities, but rather as living with one another and that education and liberty remove reliance from the equation.” But as we all know education can never be a problem, it is mostly understood as part of the solution to any problem, worldwide. Divorce is not tied to the education of a person instead tied to the happiness, trust, love, respect, a couple looks for in a conjugal relationship. No educated woman or man loves to break their home unless they are pushed to do so.
Ex: According to the last National Family Health Survey (NHFS-4) released by the Union health ministry, every third woman aged above 15 has faced domestic violence of various forms across our country. It was also shown that 31% of married women have been subjected to physical, sexual, or emotional violence by their partners. When Betty Friedan (an American writer) released The Feminine Mystique, many people felt it was her book that began the feminist movement, which in turn led divorce rates to rise. Is Betty Friedan to blame for the divorces of thousands of women? Yes, argues Coontz, who is also the head of the Council of Contemporary Families and a well-known professor of Family Studies. Friedan’s ideas, she claims, saved many relationships and ushered in a more equitable marital period. Good marriages did not become bad because of feminism.
Feminist reforms, on the other hand, allowed women to leave unsatisfactory or unjust marriages, and feminism was, in that sense, the trigger for many divorces in the 1970s and 1980s. Women who were dissatisfied in their marriages no longer had to stay married out of direct economic need after feminist reforms provided women access to better employment and prohibited discrimination in salary, employment, and promotions. Ex: A study by economist Suraj Jacob and anthropologist Sreeparna Chattopadhyay found that while 0.11 percent of the total population was divorced, the number of people separated is almost thrice the number at 0.29 percent. This demonstrates that the shame associated with divorce is still very much alive. As a result, the educated and rich form a group that may have the financial wherewithal, if not the social support, to endure a divorce. The lack of options keeps the less fortunate imprisoned in a terrible marriage.
Divorce has a lot of stigmas, and women bear the brunt of it the majority of the time. It is not easy to go through judicial processes. The emotional damage that follows a divorce is not simple to deal with for either partner. Ex: On 24 November 2014 according to the Times of India, article by Dhananjay Mahapatra, Supreme Court said, if a women complaint blaming or accusing her husband or her in-laws based on cruelty under the Sec 498A of the Indian Panel Code turn out to be false, then the man is eligible to file a divorce.
Supreme Court has ruled, allowing the dissolution of the marriage between “K.Srinivas” and “K. Sunita” in which wife has filed registered under Sec 498A but the conviction rate, where the false cruelty (dowry) case against her husband. -According to the da from The National Crime Record Bureau, the show’s that annually approx. 1 lack cases where the accusation was proven varies b/w 20% in 2011 and 14% in 2015. In 2015, the overall conviction rate under the IPC was 46%.
So, we can see every year thousands of families suffer from these false divorce cases, not only families their children suffer mentally. Divorce doesn’t just affect the couple who is splitting, their children feel the impact. One downside is that it will have a harmful influence on youngsters.
A child of divorce may develop commitment issues and doubt his ability to marry, he/she may not marry in the future because of what happened in the past. But at the same time being in a heavily burdened marriage in which no love exists, women are suffering from domestic violence or her husband is not helping her to make her dreams come true than in this situation divorce is not a bad option we just need to be true to ourselves and be ready to accept all possible consequences.
