India, April 5 -- 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, ...