The use, abuse and misuse of section 498A — the provision in law enacted to protect women from domestic violence — has so exercised public imagination in recent times that it has assumed mythic proportions. Media has been wringing its hands. A movie that “will expose how false dowry harassment cases have become a devastating tool of legal abuse” is underway. And the country’s highest court has joined the lamentation.

But first, a brief history. Section 498A was introduced in 1983 when “bride burning” — the murder of young women in so-called kitchen accidents for not bringing adequate dowry — was at its peak. Mothers like Satya Rani Chadha whose daughter Shashi Bala was pregnant when she was killed, and other activists, led a protest that eventually resulted in protections in law against cruelty by a husband and his relatives.

“In those days, the dowry act was very weak,” says Manjiri Jaruhar, Bihar’s first woman IPS office, then posted in Bokaro. “We knew........

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