This article examines the relationship between law and the police in the Special Protection Unit for Women and Children (Unit), Delhi. It explicates how women police officers negotiate meanings of ‘domestic cruelty’ under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, read with Section 498-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), in a milieu where narratives of violence they encounter from women complainants often challenge interpretations of domestic violence. Taking two instances, one in which a complainant came to the Unit without a written complaint, and the second in which changes were made to the complaint after it was officially submitted, I delineate the shape that their formal complaints took, central to which was the role performed by the police officers assigned to them. The officers, I contend, strove to make the complaints legally stand up, with the awareness that although most complaints do not end in litigation, the act of writing the complaint constituted an important step for complainants to get what I call a working sense of their experiences of cruelty. I conclude that although police’s discretionary power is understood to give way to reckless arbitrariness and discrimination, its mutability and amorphousness can also contribute towards enabling redress for injury.
CARE OR CONTROL? THE METROPOLITAN WOMEN POLICE AND CHILD WELFARE, 1919–1969
