| IRRETRIEVABLE BREAKDOWN OF MARRIAGE
By PRAVEEN DALAL 21/05/2005 At 09:13 A WORK STRESSING ON THE NEED OF INTRODUCING IRRETRIEVABLE BREAKDOWN OF MARRIAGE AS A SPECIFIC GROUND OF DIVORCE. 
PRAVEEN DALAL, CONSULTANT AND ADVOCATE, DELHI HIGH COURT, INDIA. Marriage is the very foundation of a civilised society. The relation once formed, the law step in and binds the parties to various obligations and liabilities thereunder. Marriage is an institution in the maintenance of which the public at large is deeply interested. It is the foundation of the family and in turn of the society without which no civilisation can exist.
This foundation presupposes the existence of a platform build on the basis of sound understanding between the spouses.If this understanding is missing between the spouses and the marriage is a continuous malady, then it is desirable that the marriage should be dissolve with the intervention of the court. There is no useful purpose surved by continuing such a marriage. Thus, on the basis of "irretrievable breakdon theory" such marriage should be dissolved for the common betterment of both the spouses. This is the reason why the attitude of legislature changed from the "guilt theory" to the "divorce by mutual consent" (the consent theory).
There may be a case where relation of the parties has broken down irretrievably and there is no chance of reconciliation and they are also not ready for divorce by mutual consent. In that eventuality continuing such relation is futile and as per IBM theory such marriage should be dissolve. It has also been recognised as a separate ground of divorce by many countries. In India the Law Commission in its 71st Report has recommended that irretrievable breakdown of marriage should be a separate ground of divorce for Hindus. On the basis of this report, the Marriage Law Amendment Bill 1981 was introduced in Parliament, but it was allowed to lapse due to opposition by some women organization.
It is high time that we appreciate the need of IBM theory so that spouses can have a new and better life instead of wasting their "young days" in courts.
 Email:: pd37@rediffmail.com
 URL:: http://praveen-dalal.blogspot.com
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Change it must. But how and why? Once again, these questions are not rhetorical. I do not know the answers, and can hardly guess at them. But that is the point. The terror many of us feel at the though of heterosexual marriage engineering is not a fear of what is wrong; it is rather a fear of losing our grip on what is wrong. We are not entitled - it would be a serious confusion - to think that even the most dramatic shifts in the change/choice boundary somehow challenge morality itself; that there will one day be no more wrong or right. But we are entitled to worry that our settled convictions will, in large number, be undermined, that we will be in a kind of moral free-fall, that we will have to think again against a new backgroung and with uncertain results. Playing with Maskulinity/Feminity is playing with fire.
Suppose that this hypothesis, at least as it might be corrected and unproved, makes sense, and accounts for the powerful surd in people`s emotional reaction to heterosexual marriage engineering that is not accounted for by the more discrete grounds we although examined. Have we then discovered not only an explanation but a justification for the objection, a reading of "don`t play with masculinity/feminity" that shows why, at least in this instance, we shouldn`t? I think not. We would have discovered a challenge that we must take up rather than a reason for turning back. For our hypothesis implicates no value - derivative or detached - at all. It reveals only reasons why our contemporary values, of both interpenetrated kinds, may be wrong or at least ill considered. If we are to be morally and ethically responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing Masculinity/Feminity is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Globalization, the patron saint of dangerous discovery. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.
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