Two women's rights activists on Sunday demanded from the government an inheritance and succession-like law that would ensure grandparents' rights to be with their grand-children in cases of marital discord and breakdown.
The activists, who are grandparents themselves, started on Saturday a signature-cum-awareness campaign, the first such initiative in the country, to demand a law to protect the rights of grandparents.
"We are receiving a number of complaints from the elderly people that there is no law that protects their rights as grandparents in case of matrimonial discord of their children," Bangalore-based activist Sudha Rajashekar, coordinator of the campaign, told IANS.
Rajashekar heads the grandparents' wing of the Child Rights Initiative for Shared Parenting (CRISP) based here.
Another activist, Shobha Reddy (name changed), said she was not allowed to meet her grandchildren by her estranged daughter-in-law.
"My daughter-in-law is not allowing me to meet my grandchildren. As a result, I am under depression," she said.
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Seeking a law to safeguard the rights of elderly like her, she said: "She (daughter-in-law) wants her children to have a right over my property, but she is not allowing my grandchildren to stay with me even on weekends. We want some legal protection."
Both Rajashekar and Reddy along with a handful of other activists started a campaign here to get a memorandum signed by grandparents who have fallen victims in their children's matrimonial discord.
CRISP president Kumar V. Jahgirdar told IANS there is need for changes in the existing laws on rights of grandparents.
He said grandparents, in general, feel ignored by law and society in relation to their demand and right to visit their grandchildren regularly.
According to him, there are more than 20,000 cases pending in Bengaluru family courts and lakhs across the country and the silent victims are mostly children who are deprived access to their grandparents.
Jahgirdar's NGO has also been demanding the end of discrimination between maternal grandparents and paternal grandparents and that family courts should treat both equally.
He said on the first day around 300 grandparents signed the memorandum addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The drive would be carried out in CRISP's regional chapters in Delhi, Chandigarh, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Lucknow, he said.
He quoted a Supreme Court bench as observing on August 27, 2008, in a matrimonial dispute: "We are of the view that the children should also not be alienated from the company and affection of their father or paternal grandparents."
"In our view, the children require the care, love and affection, both of the father's side of the family as well as that of the mother and that none of them should be denied access to the children," the court said.