legal rights of indian widow?

Question

If a partner of a business firm dies what are the legal rights for the widow

Answer 1

Indian Partnership Act is very clear regarding the legal rights of the heirs (wife,sons, daughters etc) of a deceased partner. Firstly any partnership comes to an end on the death of any partner unless any provision in the partnership or in the partnership deed is contrary to this general rule. Secondly if the partnership or the partnership deed does not provide of taking any heir of the deceased partners as a new partner as a replacement for the deceased partner, then as stated above the partnership comes to an end on such death. Even if there exist a provision of bringing or replacing any heir of the deceased partner exists it will amount to making a new partnership. Now what really is the right of the heir of a deceased partner? The law is very clear on this point also. The legal heir has right to the settle the final accounts of this partnership. The partnership no longer stand & all the accounts are to be finally settled amongst all the existing partners & the legal heir of the deceased partner, nothing more then this is the legal right of any legal heir of the deceased partner. For any further guidance write to me directly.

Answer 2

No. There are not any united states/united states/state etc that i understand of that can provide a blood unrelated something to a married individual right into a family contributors, except this is especially states this. The widow/widower continuously gets first dibs, no person else except reported. someplace. She would desire to continuously attempt in federal courtroom to make a ruckus. for the reason that federal regulation, trumps Indian regulation in specific circumstances.

Answer 3

She and her children has a right to take balance in capital account in deceased partner.

Answer 4

WIDOW IS NATURAL CLAIM ATE OF THE ASSETS LEFT BY HER HUSBAND.

Answer 5

Read the following three paragraphs carefully. Then answer the questions that follow:

. Janaki was a young inmate of a widows' home in Benaras. The home was run by a widow who supplied the younger inmates to zamindars and seths. Janaki was one of the widows forced into prostitution. Chuhiya was the youngest widow at the ashram. All of eight. The madam offered Chuhiya for gangrape. Chuhiya survived the rape, but only just. Janaki managed to make her way out of the ashram. But even outside it, she came to grief. She killed herself.

Gita Devi, a 77-year-old widow from Katmandu, was wed in an arranged marriage at age 5; her husband died one month later.

Like most traditional Hindus of her generation, she never remarried.

The Associated Press

. Bina was six when she was married off to a man who was 32. Her brother sold her to the bridegroom for Rs 300. For three years her husband beat her, locking her out of the house for days at a stretch. Then one day he died. At nine, Bina was a widow.

Her brother-in-law and sister-in-law then began abusing her, beating her. They wanted to drive her out of the house: she was unlucky, they said. When she grew up, she would demand her share of the property. Finally, when she was in her late teens, her sister rescued her and took her to an ashram in a nearby town.

. A funeral procession was about to leave for the cremation grounds. The widow sat cringing in a corner. No one would touch her. Three women from the barber caste were summoned. They pounced on her and tore her ornaments off. In the procession, she had to follow 200 feet behind the rest, lest her shadow fall on a married woman and she be widowed too. No one approached her all day -- even to give her water.

For 13 days after the cremation she was made to sit on the ground in the same clothes. On the 13th day she was allowed to bathe and change. The barber women came and shaved her hair off. The brahmin came to collect his dues. Then she was sent off to the Ganga on pilgrimage. Who knows if she ever came back…

Which of these stories is fact, and which fiction?

Which of these stories is set in the 19th century, which in pre-independence India, and which in contemporary India?

Give yourself 10 points for each correct answer: The first is the bare bones of the plot of Water, Deepa Mehta's controversial film set in 1930s Benaras, now abandoned, following a storm of protest last year.

The second is the real-life story of a girl who lived in a village 22 kms from the town of Madhubani in Bihar. Bina is now around 30. She lives in the Abhay Ashram in Madhubani, is literate, and manages a handicrafts emporium in the town. She earns Rs 550. "My life was played with as though it were a doll's," she said recently. "But we will make progress. We will show the kind of revolution that widows are capable of if harassed."

The third is as real as it can get too. It is based on an article by an anonymous writer titled `The Plight of Hindu Widows as Described by a Widow Herself' published in April 1889.

Only the first story, therefore, is fiction. But even that, a West Bengal government-sponsored study released recently reveals, reflects the facts. Widows from West Bengal, the northeastern states and Bangladesh still make their way to the ashrams of Vrindavan, Mathura and Varanasi, in the hope that in the holy cities, god will not allow anyone to starve.

Young widows are still being brought in by sex traffickers and sold into prostitution. The sevadasi system, in which the 'service' done to rich and powerful pilgrims is seen as an act of piety, is still prevalent. Sexual exploitation still exists at the bhajanashrams.

In September 2001, a high-level meeting of the National Human Rights Commission, representatives of the Department of Women and Child Development, Human Resource Development Ministry, and Governments of Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal was held. At this meeting, Justice JS Verma said:

It is unfortunate that nothing substantial seems to have happened to elevate the status of women who hence come to Vrindavan despite the philanthropic attitude of the people in the country to help others. The need of the hour is to take concrete steps to stop the flow of women to Vrindavan and simultaneously carry out rehabilitation programmes whereby the overall plight of these women can be improved.

The NHRC, it was decided, would be the facilitating agency that would take these concrete steps, coordinating efforts of the government and NGOs. Justice Sujata V Manohar, NHRC member who visited Vrindavan to study the plight of widows, stated that facilities such as free and clean accommodation, financial assistance and proper healthcare should be provided to these destitute women. She suggested that a fund be set up for their dignified cremation, distribution of pension, establishment of self-help groups for income-generation, provision of LPG connections for group cooking, ration cards, group housing scheme and suitable security measures.

Whether these "concrete steps" will make any difference at all to the widows of Vrindavan remains to be seen.

An earlier study, commissioned in 1992 by the National Commission for Women and conducted by Deepali Bhanot, corroborates that "the flesh trade flourishes in Vrindavan and Mathura in the full knowledge of the police, administration, holy men and politicians." Amongst the several widows interviewed, Chapla Desi, 27, is quoted as saying,

All men lust after our bodies.

Baldly stated, but essentially what the Adi Parva of the Mahabharata recorded centuries ago: "Just as birds flock to a piece of flesh left on the ground, so all men try to seduce a woman whose husband is dead."

Of the 2,910 women surveyed in the West Bengal study, 2,113 were from West Bengal, 297 from Bangladesh. Over 500 were below 30. Fifty per cent of them depend on the doles at the bhajanashrams and on begging. There is no other way to make a living. No wonder they turn to prostitution. The NCW study stated that women are paid Rs 2 plus 250 grams of rice and 50 grams of dal for singing bhajans eight hours a day. Scams in various institutions ensure that sometimes they don't get even that.

With rents skyrocketing from Rs 3 to Rs 350 per month, most widows outside the ashrams now live 30-40 to one squalid tenement. A few jute sacks constitute their bedding. Diseases such as tuberculosis, dysentery and STDs are common, but medical help is virtually non-existent. From their meagre earnings the widows must save to take care of their own last rites.

In spite of this miserable existence, only 436 widows of the 2,910 would go home given the chance. This is perhaps the saddest part of their story. For in these temple towns at least the widow is free to live her own life with others like herself. Back home it is her own family that does her out of her property, obliterates her identity and ordains for her a kind of social death.

Outcasts from their homes, some 2,000 Hindu widows live in the Bhagwan Bhajan Ashram.

The Associated Press

The problems of the destitutes in temple towns is only one visible end of the white sari. According to the 1991 Census there are 33 million widows all over India -- 8 per cent of the total female population and 50 per cent of the female population over the age of 50. In terms of prevalence of widowhood, India ranks among the highest in the world.

The incidence of widowhood rises sharply with age: 64 per cent among women aged 60 and above, and 80 per cent among women aged 70. An Indian woman who survives to old age is therefore almost certain to become a widow. In contrast, only 2.5 per cent of Indian men are widowers, and even in the older age groups only a small minority of men are widowed. The main reasons for this are the much higher rate of remarriage for widowers, and the fact that male mortality rates are higher than female.

The story of the daily deprivations of these 33 million widows is never told. Deprivations that cause mortality rates for widows to be a shocking 85 per cent higher amongst widows than among married women.

Apart from the economic problems, widows even in educated, middle class families continue to be placed under immense psychological and social pressures. Martha Alter Chen's extensive survey of widows across seven states reveals that even today widows are accused of being 'responsible' for their husband's death. They are pressurised to observe restrictive codes of dress and behaviour. They are excluded from religious and social life. They are physically and sexually abused. And they are done out of their property.

In theory, 51 per cent of widows have rights to a share in their husband's land. But these rights are often violated in practice by brothers-in-law. It is ominous that in the Jharkhand region of Bihar, of the 46 Santhal women persecuted and killed as 'witches' in recent years, 42 were widows with land rights.

What isn't entirely accurate is the popular conception that widow remarriage is prohibited in Hindu society. Only the upper castes prohibit the practice. In most other cases, widows are allowed to remarry -- including levirate marriages to their brothers-in-law -- but often don't choose to, either because of their children, or because a man agreeing to marry a widow is generally impoverished, looking for a second wife, or old.

Also, most widows today are not forced to undergo the rituals that marked the renunciation of a woman's sexuality amongst the Brahmanical upper castes. The Brahmanical tradition especially after 700 AD saw women as:

"sites of conflict between a demoniac stri-svabhava -- their innate nature, which is lustful -- and their stridharma, a woman's duty. There (was considered) no greater delight and no more destructive urge for women than sex," writes Uma Chakravarti in Widows in India: Social Neglect and Public Action (Sage, 1999), edited by Martha Alter Chen.

Early marriage was the only way to channelise her lustful sexual energies.

Through marriage and wifely devotion, the biological woman - a wild, untamed and disorderly entity -- can be converted into a 'cultured' woman, a social entity who has vanquished all the demoniac force within her.

With her husband dead, a widow's riotous passion is the cause of moral panic. She must therefore be completely neutered, desexed. The Laws of Manu laid down that she must give up ornamentation, observe fasts, emaciate the body, eat only one meal a day, and sleep on the floor. She must not eat 'hot' foods or betelnut which heats up the body. The orange haldi applied on her before marriage to heat it up for intercourse and the bloodred kumkum and sindoor that marked her out as a sexually potent female were to be substituted by the ash of the funeral pyre.

Widows in India may no longer be required to shave their hair off. But the mindset that sees a woman's identity only vis-à-vis the males around her has not really changed. As Meera Kumar, a women's activist who has written extensively on the subject of widowhood says, "The traditional Hindu blessing for a married woman is Sadaa Sowbhagyawati Bhavaa, thereby implying that marriage is the only desirable state for a woman." No wonder the widow is marginalised and reduced to a social non-entity.

On the one hand society reveres the mother as a demi-goddess. But she cannot be a goddess unless she sports sindoor and bangles. There is an absolute dichotomy in the attitudes to the woman as pativrata and as widow.


INDIA'S OUTCAST WIDOWS HAVE NEW HAVENS
By Uma Girish


April 18, 2004 – (WeNews) Widows in India still undergo ritual humiliations and extreme ostracism; conditions that several new programs are seeking to redress.

When Mohini Giri wants to describe the hardships of widows living along the banks of the Ganges, she tells the story of Shanta Bai.

When Bai was 5 years old her shoulders drooped under the weight of her bridal garland. But according to Giri, a widows' advocate, the little girl could hardly have imagined what burdens lay ahead. Her uncle had pocketed Rs.300 ($6.55) by marrying her off to a 36 year old. The husband died four years later, leaving Bai a 9-year-old widow.

Now 85, says Giri, Bai hobbles down the streets of Vrindavan, a city in the north of India, her gnarled fingers cupping a broken bowl, begging for her living while she waits for death to claim her.

Bai is one the estimated 33 million widows in India, the country with the largest widow population in the world. Among them, at least 20,000, like Bai, sit on the banks of the river Ganges and beg for alms. Vrindavan and Varanasi, holy cities in the north of India and two of the country's most sought-after pilgrim centers, have become home to the husbandless.

Conference Drew Attention

Giri is chair of the New Delhi-based Guild of Service, which aids women and children. Two years ago, the national volunteer group focused international attention on the plight of women such as Bai with a conference about the situation of India's widows.

Attendees produced a series of demands, including reforms to legal inheritance rights, a plan for economic empowerment and laws to mitigate their physical and social abuse.

Delegates at the conference also formed the New Delhi-based South Asian Alliance for Widows to lobby local governments to provide support and plans to assist widows in gaining more power throughout India. Spurred by these gatherings and initiatives, the central government formed a committee to address the needs of the widows of Vrindavan.

In the short term, the committee aims to provide widows along the Ganges with shelter, medical care and education. In longer and broader terms, it aims to bring such widows in from the outskirts of society.
A look at the cultural forces that have made the northern holy cities of Vrindavan and Varanasi a home to the husbandless show what such efforts are up against.

The preponderance of widows in the two holy cities can often be couched in the euphemistic terms of religious reverence. According to traditional Hindu belief, those who die in a pilgrim center are freed from the eternal cycle of life and death and even attain moksha, or emancipation.

But, Giri says, few widows choose to spend or end their lives as beggars. Many are thrown out of family homes by their children or abandoned by their in-laws as evil women who caused the death of their husbands.

"This is the plight of most of the widows who arrive in Vrindavan," she says. "Without a man by her side a woman has no respect in Indian society. It is part of a patriarchal culture."

Ritual Humiliation

Although the horrific practice of sati--requiring widows to throw themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres--was abolished in 1829, widows still undergo ritual humiliations. After the death of a husband, a woman is shorn of her bridal ornamentation; her head is shaved by the local barber and her body is wrapped in a stark white sari so she may not arouse carnal pleasures in other men.

The bright red sindoor, the red smear that a married woman wears in the parting of her hairline, is substituted by a vertical ash smear from the top of her forehead to the top of her nose. Her very presence is considered so inauspicious that even her shadow may not fall on a married woman lest her terrible fate befall the other woman.

"In India a woman is respected only if she is a mother, daughter and wife," says Giri. "While we have come to accept death we have unfortunately not learned to accept widows."

The 1856 Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act gave women the legal right to remarry and the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 gave women the same inheritance rights as men. Those rights, however, are rarely put into practice.
Since women in India are often married off at a young age instead of being educated, they usually lack the skills and knowledge to fend for themselves economically and fight for their basic rights.

When they arrive at Vrindavan and Varanasi, the widows find shelters that were built almost a century ago for local ashrams or religious institutions. Today, the cramped, leaky spaces--administered by local government officials--accommodate about three women each, who sleep on torn sacks.

They receive meager rations of rice and lentils only if they spend six hours singing devotional songs at the ashram. Young widows are often lured into sex in exchange for more food or money.

Alternative Housing

For some widows, however, there is an alternative.

In 1998, Giri marshaled her contacts and developed Aamar Bari, or My Home, a large housing complex in Vrindavan that shelters over 100 widows, between the ages of 40 and 105. The women here learn skills such as weaving, embroidery, beadwork, nursing and spinning, which Giri hopes will one day translate into economic independence. The women worship together, receive medical help at a small clinic and eat regular meals.

The government is also beginning to try to help widows who are cast out by their families. One of the plans is Swadhar, an $11 million network of shelters, which will provide food, medical care, education, counseling and training.

Giri says education is one of the most important components of the new initiatives. With education, she says, comes an empowerment that can help widows build a new identity for themselves. Otherwise, she says, "their voices will be stifled from the cradle to the grave."