Husband forced me to abort five times, claims woman

By Seth Onyango

Date: December 08, 2015

The ongoing annual campaign against gender-based violence has yielded a heart-rending case in which a Nairobi tycoon’s wife says she has been forced to abort five times by her husband who, apparently, never wants to have a baby with her.
Savita Verma, 48, has been stirred by the anti-gender violence campaign to come out and seek divorce in court, saying the man who swore to love, cherish and protect her has been her “worst tormentor”. “I weep for my children who were never born.
I wake up each morning so depressed that I sometimes lack the energy to get out of bed. I have nothing to live for. I have no hope of ever having a child,” she sobs out her heart-chilling account of living with a man she has accused in court of being abusive and stealing her dream of being a mother.
The annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign, running till December 10, has been her eye-opener as she decided to make open court proceedings that had gone on away from media glare.

The court process has not favoured her but Verma says she is fighting to the bitter end. She first filed her case through a pro bono (free) lawyer at the Family Division Court before Judge GBM Kariuki, for maintenance by her husband whom she claimed had neglected her.But the court, in a November 12 ruling, declined to grant her prayer for maintenance or alimony. Now she has prepared appeal papers which she is set to present in court, seeking not just maintenance but also divorce.
Details of the marriage that is ready to spill in the corridors of justice are moving. Seventeen years ago, Verma narrates, she was swept off her feet by the alluring charm of her husband Purshotam Hirani, but later her fairytale would turn into a living epic horror.
“I was 29 when we met. We had so many hopes and goals. We talked about things like having children and finances,” she says. From the onset, she had been coached that marriage in her Hindu culture was a well-laid bed of roses—at least to the eyes of society—in which one must endure everything for life. “When I met him, he told me and my family that we would marry in 1999.
Therefore, I agreed to fly with him to Nairobi from Mumbai (India),” she says. But every year Hirani kept promising her he would formalise the marriage.
That promise was not fulfilled until 2012, having been kept and treated as a mistress for 14 years, she says in her affidavit. “All those years, I stayed in Kenya on a visitor’s pass and was, therefore, not able to engage in any lawful employment, making Hirani my sole breadwinner and husband,” she says.
But, despite the agonising ordeal, she worked for her spouse’s company for 11 years without a work permit, she says in the affidavit, adding that, “Within this period I have been ill-treated, battered…I have a lot of scars on my body (showing some).”
Verma will tell the court her husband did not open for her any bank account, gave her any kind of security or insurance including medical cover.
“Whenever I got pregnant he forced me to abort as he did not want any child from me… Five times he did this to me,” she says, claiming Hirani would allegedly drag her out of the house for an abortion in a clinic.
Verma went to India for a pilgrimage last year, but when she returned things had changed for the worse. Her husband didn’t allow her back into the house. She was finally allowed in on condition she lives in the guest wing.
One-and-half years since Verma returned from India, she claims, she hasn’t got any upkeep from Hirani and has been depending on friends for food, medicine and clothes and that’s why she seeks maintenance.
She went to court seeking interim maintenance order of Sh690,000 per month, from her husband who was once the chairman of a leading golf club in Kiambu county.
In the court papers seen by the People Daily, Verma says in her appeal affidavit, despite moving into a different room in the couple’s matrimonial home, Hirani continued to threaten her and efforts to seek help were futile.
She has multiple P3 forms, including one she obtained recently, after being allegedly battered. Hirani argued in the Family Division Court that he had no funds and should not be compelled to support someone capable of earning a living.
But she says, being essentially a foreigner, she is unable to lawfully engage in gainful employment and the respondent is a man of great means and is therefore able to provide for her. The ruling by justice GBM Kariuki came out to her husband’s advantage.
The judge ruled: “No spouse who is capable of earning should be allowed to shirk his or her responsibility to support himself or herself, or turn the other spouse into a beast of burden.” “Neither alimony nor maintenance should be paid as a matter of course. It should be used as a field spouses cash in on their partners”.
http://www.mediamaxnetwork.co.ke/people-daily/185148/husband-forced-me-to-abort-five-times-claims-woman/