Dowry Deaths: A Collection of Articles
6 Point Program To Eradicate Dowry And Bride-Burning In India, By Mr. Himendra Thakur ~ Mon, 13 Dec 1999
Bail Granted to Illyasi in 'Dowry Death' Case, (PTI) June 2, 2000
Suicide Of 4 Sisters From Poor Family Arouses Feminists, By Marion Lloyd ~ May 21, 2000
Are Our Sisters and Daughters for Sale? By Himendra Thakur, India Today ~ June 1999
Victims of Sudden Affluence, By Ramesh Vinayak, India Today ~ December 1997
We Invite Our Readers to Submitt Articles
Another Resource on Dowry Related Issues
INCAP Bureau of Anthropology & South East Asia Studies.
They host several pages on dowry related issues, and an official page on the "5th international conference on dowry, brideburning and son-prefence in India, 2001" in India. Help us help the dowry victims and please put up a link to these pages.
Submitted by:
Steven Rene Marchand, Anthropologist - Researcher
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Leuven Belgium
Webmaster of the Incap Bureau and www.india-united.org
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6 Point Program To Eradicate Dowry And Bride-Burning In India
By Mr. Himendra Thakur ~ Mon, 13 Dec 1999
There are 3 ways towards implementation :
(1) Raise funds to implement the program,
(2) Convince the Government of India to implement the program,
(3) A combination of the above two.
In the last 20 years, we have noticed that most of the feminist organizations and activist groups in India take recourse to street demonstration. They create a large volume of noise, block the traffic,create an ambience of indiscipline : they march on the streets, and at the end, they submit a highly emotional memorandum to the Prime Minister of India, asking him to do everything. The PM cannot do everything himself ! He gives the memorandum to the group of secretaries/bureaucrats who run the government, with the hope that they will take action. The officers are inundated with this kind of memorandums. Moreover, dowry and bride-burning is tacitly supported by a large section of population, including some bureaucrats. It is very likely that the memorandum on Dowry & Bride-Burning will stay at the bottom of the pile for a long time. We are trying in a modified way. Instead of submitting a high pitched emotional memorandum to the PM, we plan to submit a 50 page "Work-Plan"with conceptual details towards actual implementation.
Dowry& bride-burning is a deep-rooted problem.
We must back up that"Work-Plan" with elaborate research papers which will diagnose the roots of the problem, how the evil is spreading in different sections of population, the legal aspect, economic aspect, sociological and psychological aspect, and spiritual & religious approach.
In the four international conferences and a number of seminars at Harvard University and London University, we have gathered some in-depth research papers. Some of them are published in the Souvenir of the conferences and in a book "South Asians and the Dowry Problem" published by Trentham Books of England. We need to do more work and we must hold the next Conference in India. We will invite the scholars from Indian Universities to contribute research papers. The conceptual "work-plan" will be backed by all these research work.
The Prime Minister will have ample research work needed to implement the program. It is not realistic for us to try to raise funds to implement the entire program, because it is huge. The funds that we raise should be used to motivate the Government of India, because some of the plans must be taken up at national level. If you wish, you may help us by raisingfunds to meet the expenses of the next conference in New Delhi, which will be at least $10,000. If you can inspire a few of your friends to contribute a sum similar to what you plan to contribute, that will be agreat help.
If I can be free from the finance and fundraising headaches, I can devote my energies to prepare the "Work-Plan". Please also send us your ideas and the ideas of your friends about the "Six Point Program"and about the "Work-Plan" to be submitted to the PM.With the best wishes to your friends, your family and yourself,
Sincerely yours,
Himendra Thakur Chair, Board of Directors International Society Against Dowry and Bride-Burning in India, Inc. SADABBI P.O. Box 8766 Salem, MA-01971, USA, TEL: USA-978-462-6159 FAX: USA-978-462-6347. ISADABBI is A Tax-Exempt Non-Profit Incorporation in the USA)
6 Point Program To Eradicate Dowry And Bride-Burning In India
1. Major Economic Program: Long Term Plan:
1(a) Enforce mandatory education of females for financial independence and autonomy,
1(b) Introduce a "Service Loan Fund" to provide low-interest loans to wage-earning males who wish to pay-off their parents thereby preventing the possibility of parents' claim of dowry as a compensation of expenses in raising and educating their sons,
1(c) Originate an "Old Age Fund" in India to finance old people thereby eliminating their dependency upon their sons.
2. National Support Groups Long Term Plans:
2(a). Organize and operate "Students Against Dowry" mutual support groups for male and female students and fresh graduates
(i) to promote the resolve of refusal of marriage if there is a dowry, &
(ii) to support their struggle against parental pressure for demand/acceptance/giving of dowry.
2(b). Organize and operate "Parents Against Dowry" mutual support groups of parents
(i) who oppose the dowry system, &
(ii) whose daughters have been victims of dowry.
3. Research And Mass Communication: Long Term Plan:
3(a). Promote research to identify and diagnose the dowry problem in India, hold interviews, group/panel discussions, meetings, seminars, conferences, internet discussions, and recommend legal, psychological, spiritual and social remedies to eradicate the evil of dowry and bride-burning.
3(b). Promote mass communication and education programs to publicize anti-dowry ideology through drama, music, movies, radio and television programs, books, periodicals, journals, handbills, and other audio-visual media.
4. Micro-Economic Approach: Long Term Plan:
This item will be developed to diagnose the dowry problem by micro-economic studies and recommend ways and means to combat the subtle micro-economic forces like demand, supply, greed, etc. which sustain the dowry system.
5. Legal Approach: Long Term Plan:
5(a). Reformative Law: Reform Indian legal system to enforce a daughter's inheritance rights to the estates of her parents, forefathers and other ancestors.
5(b). Preventive Law: Enhance Indian legal system to declare a marriage null and void as soon as dowry is demanded, and compensate the divorced bride with the half of the estate of her ex-husband.
6. Immediate Life-Saving Mechanism:
6(a). Construct dignified, high-rise, secured and protected buildings in a number of towns/cities in India and operate "Job Center for Dowry Victims" equipped with telephone hot-lines, attended by speciaists trained to handle distress calls, where a dowry victim will receive effective security, respectable accommodation, food and clothing, legal protection, medical care, psychological and spiritual care, sports & recreational facilities, study material and a job-oriented training till she is qualified to find a job and qualified to lead a financially independent life.
6(b). Construct dignified, high-rise, secured and protected buildings for financially independent, working women.
Thanks, Rajan Malhotra
Please feel free to contact me or Mr. Himendra Thakur if you need any other information.
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Bail Granted to Illyasi in 'Dowry Death' Case
Press Trust of India, June 2, 2000
New Delhi, June 2: Suhaib Illyasi was granted bail by the Delhi High Court in the case relating to his wife's alleged dowry death on Friday.
Accepting Illyasi's bail application, Justice Dalveer Bhandari directed him to furnish a personal bond of Rs two lakh and two sureties of like amount in the trial court.
Imposing various conditions on Illyasi, the court ordered that he should not go outside the National Capital Territory of Delhi without its permission and surrender his passport to the police. The court also said that he would not contact any of the witnesses in the case.
Since the investigation into the case was over, there was no reason for detaining the accused in judicial custody, the court said.
Illyasi was arrested on March 28, following a complaint by his Canada-based sister-in-law Rashmi Singh and mother-in-law Rukma Singh that he allegedly used to torture his wife Anju for dowry.
Justice Bhandari said that he had not made any observation on the merit of the case and any averment in the order would in no way affect the trial proceedings in the case.
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Suicide Of 4 Sisters From Poor Family Arouses Feminists
By Marion Lloyd, Globe Correspondent, May 21
BHILAI, India - It was going to cost Kavita Ratre $250 to marry off each of her four daughters, an impossibly large sum for the widow of a low-caste carpenter, but a must if she hoped to secure them a better life.
She got the money. But only after her daughters - aged 16 to 24 - committed suicide together last month. They hanged themselves to spare her the burden of coming up with their dowries.
In the weeks since, feminists and human-rights activists have blamed India's dowry system for the deaths, saying the tradition places an unfair burden on poor families while reducing women to mere cash commodities.
The state government responded by paying the mother $1,000 in sympathy money. It was an attempt to compensate for what, even by the standards of this impoverished industrial town, was a horrific tragedy.
"I have lost my daughters. What use is money to me now?" Ratre said, her head leaning against her shuttered house, which she did not enter for 10 days after the suicides.
She told how the girls had lovingly prepared sweets for her the night before their deaths. And how they had waited for her to leave the house the following morning, on a trip to get money for food from her two carpenter sons, before carrying out their plan.
But she denied, with a mixture of defiance and shame, that the sisters had committed suicide to spare their family the burden of providing their dowries. There was "no problem of the marriages," she said, explaining that her two sons had left school and taken jobs as laborers to come up with the funds for the wedding expenses.
The suicide note, however, indicated otherwise. It revealed their unwillingness to burden their widowed mother and brothers with their plight. Securing suitable matches for one's daughters is considered a sacred duty in Indian culture, regardless of a family's financial constraints. And even if dowry is not involved, a simple marriage ceremony can throw a family into financial ruin.
"We can't see our mother and brothers harried and humiliated anymore," the sisters wrote in the letter found tucked in the oldest girl's salwarkamiz, the local dress of a loose tunic and pajama pants. "We hope they'll have some chance of a decent living, now that they don't have us to worry about."
While not always required, the offer of a dowry was crucial to securing matches for the four sisters. The girls were afflicted with a triple stigma: poverty, their parents' mixed-religion marriage - their mother was born a Muslim - and the recent death of their Hindu father.
Mixed marriages are widely shunned in India, especially among Hindus and Muslims, who have vied for centuries for control of the Indian subcontinent. The girls' lack of a father was also a stumbling block to finding good matches, in a culture in which marriages are viewed as an opportunity to build alliances between the heads of two families. They were further hindered because their father died of tuberculosis, a disease that Indians often equate with uncleanliness and poverty.
The combination of factors meant the sisters would probably have to marry below their caste, if they married at all. Already, two of the sisters were beyond the typical marriage age of 18 for girls in Bhilai.
"They were not attractive candidates," a neighbor, Anil Prajapati, said of them, adding, "nobody would voluntarily marry into a family like that." He said the few boys who had made marriage offers were from even poorer families, and mostly illiterate.
The mother acknowledged the girls were depressed by their lack of good marriage prospects. But, she said, "we never expected they would do something like this."
The tragedy shook this once-booming steel town in central Madhya Pradesh state, whose residents had long taken pride in their relatively liberal attitude toward women. Dowry, they insisted, was never part of the tradition of the area's primarily tribal inhabitants, where gender disparities are less extreme than among Hindu families. The community also was known for its permissive attitude toward divorce and extramarital affairs for men and women.
"It's really very shocking, a shame for the whole society," said D.N. Sharma, the director of a government-funded literacy project in Bhilai.
Sharma blamed the spread of the dowry system, which has filtered down from the upper castes, for creating unrealistic demands on poor families. Where the bride's parents once were expected to send their daughter off with a bed, some basic household goods, or gold - to be kept by the bride in lieu of inheritance - the groom's family is now likely to demand exorbitant gifts such as refrigerators, television sets, and even cars, which the in-laws want for their own use.
The growing prevalence of dowry is part of a broader trend in India, where local customs are fast giving way to middle-class aspirations of wealth and upward mobility. The shift in values became most apparent after India opened its economy to outside investment in 1991, unleashing a flood of consumer goods. The arrival of satellite television a year later further fueled consumer cravings.
A parallel movement for social empowerment at the grass-roots level is gaining momentum. The turning point came with a 1993 law expanding the powers of local councils and reserving one-third of the seats for women. In some states, the system has been so successful that women are winning seats in elections over men even where no quotas are in place.
But there have been negative repercussions as well.
"On the one hand, you have women and other deprived groups struggling to move up in society, and refusing to accept their prescribed position in life," said Ilena Sen, who runs a women's rights group in Bhilai. "But on the other hand, there are bound to be casualties along the way, as people's expectations aren't met."
The Ratre sisters were among those victims.
The second oldest, Hemlata, 21, knew karate and dreamed of becoming a police officer. She had a 12th-grade education in a community where most girls drop out after eighth grade. But the police refused to grant her a job interview, apparently because of her family's low social status, according to neighbor Prajapati.
And all four were reportedly frustrated by the men who had approached their mother with marriage proposals. The younger of their two brothers, Sooraj, 19, told how his sisters had dismissed some of the candidates as "too ugly" and others as simply too poor.
"They were too picky. Really, they wanted to marry a Maruti," he said, referring to the make of car popular among India's middle class.
He shrugged off the suggestion that they might have been ashamed of having to rely on their brothers for food, or the strain the marriage preparations had put on their mother's failing health.
"We would have provided for them. We would have made sure they got married," he said, fighting back tears. "But did they ever think how we would feel after they were gone?"
Others said the sisters were right to be discriminating in accepting future husbands.
"If they were picky, it's because the status of a woman is determined by a male," said a senior government official in Madhya Pradesh, who asked to remain anonymous. "If what she does right now determines her status, and therefore her life for the next 50 years, why should she not be picky?"
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Are Our Sisters and Daughters for Sale?
By Himendra Thakur, India Together June 1999
Doesn't the love of one's country include love for one's countrymen? Or is it merely a fashionable thing, patriotism merely to find pride in something but not to actually strive towards a better nation? A country is her people. Years ago, Rabindranath Tagore summed it up as: "Desh mrinmoy noi, desh chinmoy" The country is not a chunk of earth: it is a saga of consciousness.Without the conscience of our people, this consciousness will fade. We must rouse ourselves to the daily indignities that surround us.
There are a thousand places and ways we can begin loving the people of our nation, and I offer but one here. It is a journey that each of us can begin quite easily, because the victims of this malaise - dowry - are within reach, they are our mothers, sisters, friends, neighbors. People who we normally think of as "one of our own", who we ought to protect with our lives if necessary, and yet the normal course of things has fallen so low that indignities heaped on our women do little more than make us look away.
Let us begin, then, with the people whose suffering we have even ceased to notice, let alone empathize with. Let us begin with the women around us, those whose marriage through dowry we regard as normal when in fact it is apalling. Countless brides in India are constantly under harassment in their matrimonial homes because their fathers have fallen behind in the payment of endless dowry installments, or the dowry she did bring to her husband is regarded as too meagre.
Imagine the plight of a young woman, newly wed into an unfamiliar situation, and surrounded by those she has only just met, who regard her as a means to an end, little more than a device by which to enrich themselves. She knows only too well that a bride may be killed for lack of dowry ... she too must have heard the same stories we've all heard ... but she does not know what to do. She may have overheard her in-laws, evenher, and sometimes contemplate even killing her! the kind of fear that instills in a person is beyondour ability to comprehend. It isn't even fear, it is terror.
The cruelest aspect of this menace is the role that brides' parents play in perpetuating it. My inquiry at the Dowry Cell of New Delhi Police Department revealed that most of the parents of the bride do not want to take their daughters back. There is considerable social stigma in India against those parents who shelter a married daughter back in their family. In most of the cases, parents persuade the daughter to go back to her husband's home, that is considered to be the highest form of behavior one can learn from the old scriptures.
The alternative for the scared bride is to go to one of those government shelters. However, these shelters are controlled by unscrupulous bureaucrats and their politician bosses who are accused of taking full advantage of the helpless condition of the victims who come to the shelters. The reputation and working condition of most of the shelters are so horrible that a bride will prefer to die at the hands of her in-laws than to move one of those "shelters".
So, she stays in the house of her in-laws, resigned to her fate. Then, one evening, when she is working in the kitchen, someone throws a pail of kerosene on her, and someone else throws a burning match, and she turns into a ball of flames. Can she save herself by taking off her clothes ? There is no time. Petroleum products like kerosene or gasoline work very fast, aided by her own body heat. Once that splinter is thrown, there is no more chance of life.
Perhaps this sort of recital is gruesome, and we look away. We imagine that it cannot happen to anyone we know, that our education and money has raised us above these village truths. But that isn't so - we merely glamorize the slavery we perpetuate, and pretend to endow our daughters and sisters with "gifts". These aren't dowries, we tell ourselves, this is just to help her get a good start. Conveniently, we overlook the fact that there's more than one person getting married, we don't ask often enough why this good start mustn't come from both sides.
With these pretexts, we dismiss these as unimportant issues. And as we look away, an estimated 25,000 brides are killed or maimed every year in India over dowry disputes. Intellectuals pull out their calculator and say it is less than 0.003% of India's population. They slide into research mode and throw a vast array of statistics about atrocities on women in USA, UK, Pakistan, and many other countries of the world. Foundation owners refuse to help because there are so many other problems in India like street beggars, lepers, street children, bonded laborers, etc.
So, the brides keep on burning. Except, when she burns, the "problem" is one hundred percent hers, not 0.003%. She is NOT suffering from economic exploitation like bonded labor or economic deprivation like poverty : she is instead suffering from a very complex psychological set up in the minds of most of the people, the apathy of our times, and the stench of our unwillingness to eradicate dowry.
Many intellectuals do not like to talk about this subject. They open their speech with a presentation how India is doing very good in other field like computers, space technology, etc., as if achievements in these fields can be used as excuses to burn the brides. A nation that trades in its people, sells its daughters into ready bondage, what words can describe these horrors? What kind of progress teaches us to ignore these problems, to pretend that these can never come past our doors.
One day, our daughters too will pass into slavery, and the jewel in our eyes will lead the wretched life we choose to look away from. When will it be enough?
Dowry Deaths, 1994 Source: National Crimes Bureau, Home Ministry
Andhra Pradesh - 396 Assam - 13 Bihar - 296 Gujarat - 105 Haryana - 191 Himachal Pradesh - 4 Jammu & Kashmir - 1 Karnataka - 170 Kerala - 9 Madhya Pradesh - 354 Maharashtra - 519 Nagaland - 2 Orissa - 169 Punjab - 117 Rajasthan - 298 Tamilnadu - 83 Tripura - 6 Uttar Pradesh - 1977 West Bengal - 349 Andaman & Nicobar - 1 Chandigarh - 3 Delhi - 132 Pondicherry - 4
Total - 5199
Himendra Thakur is a founding member of the International Society against Dowry and Bride Burning in India, Inc., a non-profit, tax-exempt organization in the United States. He is currently Chairman of the Society's Board of Directors and Subcommittee on Fundraising.
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By Ramesh Vinayak, India Today ~ December 15, 1997
In the villages of Punjab, terror has come stalking again. This time the weapon of fear is not the gun, but a can of petrol and a matchbox. A woman on fire has made dowry deaths the most vicious of social crimes; it is an evil endemic to the subcontinent but despite every attempt at justice the numbers have continued to climb. Especially in Punjab, where dowry death figures have risen from 55 in 1986 to 157 already this year. These official figures are but a glimpse of the truth. A recent field survey by the Institute of Development and Communication (IDC), a Chandigarh-based policy think-tank, revealed that in1995, although 59 cases were reported, a staggering 17,649 cases of dowry harassment were not. Social scientists are desperately attempting to unveil the causes, local residents occasionally try and prevent it, and the accused have been turned into social pariahs. Despite all this, an epidemic appears in the making in Punjab.
It is a phenomenon that escapes easy answers; the continued harassment due to a complex mix of social trends. The sudden affluence that emerged in rural Punjab in the mid-to-late '80s was a primary factor. The money, says Panjab University sociologist P.N. Pimpley "was not channelised productively".
Instead of using it to enhance women's education, for instance, it was used to perpetuate ostentatious lifestyles. With get-rich-quick becoming the new mantra, dowry became the perfect instrument for upward material mobility. Says Pam Rajput, chairperson of the Centre for Women's Studies in Panjab University: "Growing consumerism is fuelling these crimes." Symptomatic of this trend was the rising prevalence of the so-called "Maruti marriages". If once a Chetak scooter sufficed, soon a car was the very minimum. The effect was quickly evident. As the IDC study states, the quantum of dowry exchange may still be greater among the upper classes, but 85 per cent of dowry deaths and 80 per cent of dowry harassment occurs in the middle and lower stratas.
For women it is a difficult battle to win. They are handicapped by history, victims of a firmly embedded gender system. Not surprisingly, of the 10 districts in India with the lowest female-to-male sex ratio, three are in Punjab. The inference from all this is obvious. as IDC Director Pramod Kumar says, "In such a detrimental gender system, dowry is the main consideration for a woman's status elevation."
Still, some women -- though a in minority -- are fighting back. More aware, better exposed to a liberal culture, they educated and refuse to be conveniently fitted into stereotyped roles; it is an impressive defiance, but it comes at a cost. Says Oshima Raikhi, president of the Punjab Istri Sabha, a leading ngo: "Increased awakening has led to a growing resistance against dowry demands but consequently resulted in greater familial friction." Agyapal Kaur, for example, wanted her educated daughter-in-law Simmi to devote more time to learning religious scriptures. "But she was more interested in fashion," says Agyapal. She tells only half of a tragic story; driven to desperation, Simmi committed suicide by burning herself within a year of marriage. Agyapal, who along with her husband and son now faces life imprisonment, is unrepentant. Her hands shivering, she weeps: "I would never hurt a fly."
There is the smell of the paradox everywhere. Even in the manner in which society views dowry: the guilty are ostracised, but exchanging dowry is still, if not a social norm, widely acceptable. Two months ago, residents of Kapurthala retrieved the half-burnt body of Geetanjali from a funeral pyre, foiling an attempt by her in-laws to surreptitiously cremate her. It was a rare public outcry, silenced only after the police registered a case against her husband and in-laws. Adarsh, the mother-in-law, herself a postgraduate from an affluent family, now living the life of an undertrial, says, "We are still scared of going out on bail."
It is a fear that echoes through the Ludhiana Women's Jail. Inside the barred doors is humiliation, outside awaits public ire. Baldev Kaur and her mother Tarsem Kaur were roughed up by enraged locals when they recently appeared in court. Even if appeals for police protection are met, only scorn greets them when they return home. So Jaswant, a middle-aged convict, has shifted her entire family to another town. Says she: "When I go on parole I pretend to neighbours that I am a working woman returning home on a visit."
Yamuna Kaur and her daughter Kartar live an untouchable's existence as well: first the village panchayat ostracised them. Then Yamuna's son remarried and severed his ties with them.
It is not unusual behaviour. So complete is the discrimination among women that the gender bias is extended even towards the guilty. In a bizarre trend, the onus of murder is often put on the women to protect the men. Sometimes it is by consent. Often, old mothers-in-law embrace all the blame to bail out their sons and husbands. Sometimes it is by sheer deceit. When Baksheesh Kaur's sister-in-law died, both she and her husband were charged with her dowry death; yet, while she was sentenced to life imprisonment, her husband reached an out-of-court financial settlement with the family and abandoned her. Rues the 24-year-old Baksheesh: "It's a double punishment." IDC's Kumar concurs:
"Mostly the anti-dowry law becomes an instrument to protect the gender system rather than question its survival."
Despite every stigma, dowry continues to be the signature of marriage. Says Rainuka Dagar, currently researching crime against women in Punjab: "It is taken as a normative custom and dowry harassment as a part of family life." The odd locality may pull a body off a funeral pyre, but social intervention is low and ignorance high. According to the IDC survey, 88 per cent of woman panches were unaware that a dowry demand is punishable by law. Mahila mandals too are relatively impotent; in the 9,400 such mandals in Punjab, 82 per cent of members are in the 36-or-above age group, while 45 per cent are over 55 years. Consequently, they are snidely referred to as "mother-in-law mahila mandals".
While the laws remain stringent -- a dowry death is a relatively easier crime to prosecute than murder -- the crimes continue. Most go unreported. as the IDC study says, for every reported case, 299 go unregistered. And of those reported only 5 per cent, say sociologists, are legally pursued. A compromise through monetary means has become an easy alternative. "But for the out-of-court settlements, the women's jail would be overflowing with those charged in dowry-related crimes," says Jagjit Kaur Gill, superintendent at the Ludhiana Women's Jail. As it is, of the 130 inmates in the jail, 72 are connected with dowry deaths. They spend their days in silent prayer, swearing in front of God that they are innocent. Outside, the brides still burn.
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