-Ramphal Kataria
Divorced to Save Land: How Law Is Used to Erase Women
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker
Haryana is a small state in northern India, administratively divided into 21 districts and 80 subdivisions. Sirsa, situated in the north-western part of the state and bordering Punjab to the north and Rajasthan to the west, presents a social reality that is both distinctive and disturbing. While rural Haryana broadly shares common socio-economic features, this region stands apart due to the overwhelming dominance of large landowners—an imbalance far sharper here than in most other parts of the state.
Land reforms implemented in Haryana during the 1970s sought to place ceilings on agricultural holdings. Landowners were permitted to retain less than 18 acres of irrigated double-crop land, up to 25 acres of single-crop land, and up to 50 acres of inferior or non-irrigated land. However, in Sirsa district—particularly in Ellenabad—the intent of these reforms was quietly subverted. At the time of implementation, much of the land was barren and unirrigated, enabling landlords to legally retain vast tracts. With the later expansion of irrigation and agricultural development, these lands turned fertile and highly profitable, generating enormous wealth for a few.
“Where there is inequality, law does not operate equally—it adapts itself to power.”
This transformation widened the economic gulf between marginal farmers and large landowners. Small farmers and landless families struggled to meet both productive and non-productive expenses—seeds, fertilizers, implements, medical treatment, and deeply entrenched social obligations such as the marriage of daughters and bhat-chhuchhak (customary gifts and monetary assistance given to daughters on ceremonial occasions). Lacking access to institutional credit, they borrowed from landlords at exorbitant interest rates. Over time, repayment became impossible. Small parcels of land were sold under coercive conditions, gradually consolidating landholdings in the hands of a few powerful families, far exceeding legally permissible limits.
The inevitable question arose: how was this surplus land to be protected from state acquisition?
The answer lay in the most vulnerable members of the family—the women.
In a society that is deeply feudal and patriarchal, women possess little voice and even less awareness of legal or economic dealings. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” In western Haryana, this “becoming” often means learning to disappear silently.
Large landowners devised a calculated and socially sanctioned strategy: using the legal identity of married women to shield surplus land. Mutually agreed divorce petitions were filed in courts, where husbands formally consented to transfer land to their wives as a means of livelihood and maintenance. In reality, this land belonged to the surplus pool and would otherwise have been liable for acquisition.
A unit of surplus land was thus “saved” by legally dissolving a marriage.
“Patriarchy has no gender—it survives on silence.”
The cruelty of this arrangement is difficult to overstate. The woman—often a mother of young children—continued to live within the same household, raising the children of her “divorced” husband, under the same roof, but without legal status, social dignity, or security. Marriage, sanctified through sacred rituals and lifelong vows to protect a woman’s honour and safety, was reduced to a disposable legal instrument for protecting property.
This is male hegemony at its most grotesque. Women are used to fulfill sexual roles, to bear and raise children, and ultimately to sacrifice their legal existence for male economic gain. Their silence is manufactured, not chosen. As Bell Hooks wrote, “Patriarchy has no gender. Women can perpetuate it just as easily as men, when survival demands submission.”
The exploitation does not end with divorce.
In June 2014, the government notified exemption of stamp duty on the transfer of acquired property within the family. The same woman—now legally divorced—is compelled to transfer the land she received through the court decree back to the man or his family, citing herself as a divorced wife. This transaction is fundamentally untenable: once a marriage is annulled, the familial relationship ceases to exist. Yet, the process continues unchecked, robbing the state of revenue and normalizing fraud under the cover of legality.
“A woman without legal identity is the easiest subject of exploitation.”
What unfolds here is not merely economic manipulation but the systematic annihilation of women’s personhood. Economics becomes the deciding force that dictates whether a woman will retain dignity, legal identity, or even recognition as a human being within her own household.
In the so-called affluent families of this feudal order, women are expected to erase themselves to safeguard male wealth. Monetary corruption may be investigated and punished, but who will confront this deeper moral decay? Who will fight a corruption that destroys human values, abuses judicial processes, and turns women into expendable instruments of accumulation?
“The true measure of a society is not how it treats its wealthy men, but how easily it sacrifices its women.”
In this part of Haryana, patriarchy does not merely subordinate women—it consumes them. Their suffering is normalized, their sacrifice glorified, their erasure justified in the name of family honour and economic security. When a society compels its women to surrender marriage, legality, and dignity to protect land and wealth, one must ask: is this still a society of humans? Or an immoral order sustained by a uniquely brutal form of corruption—where the ultimate cost is a woman’s erased existence?
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