Resistance to Dowry Jolts India's Society

RIGHTS-INDIA:
Resistance to Dowry Jolts Society
Ranjit Devraj - IPS - 5/28/03

In one of her better known verses, the late Indian poetess Madhumita Shukla exhorted Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to ''marry (former Pakistani Prime Minister) Benazir Bhutto and bring back Pakistan as dowry''.

NEW DELHI, May 28 (IPS) - In one of her better known verses, the late Indian poetess Madhumita Shukla exhorted Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to ''marry (former Pakistani Prime Minister) Benazir Bhutto and bring back Pakistan as dowry''.

Preposterous, but it was the stuff with which Shukla regaled crowds at fiery poetry reading sessions in northern Uttar Pradesh state until her gruesome murder earlier in May. Shukla's poetry was abysmal, but is a pointer to prevalent social attitudes, says Ranjana Kumari, an activist for women's rights.

''Dowry is totally a part of the South Asian psyche, though violence against brides who fail to bring in enough dowry is probably worse in India than in Pakistan or Bangladesh,'' said Ranjana, who authored the 1999 study 'Brides are Not for Burning'.

She recalled that on a bus ride to Pakistan in November 2000, undertaken by women's groups to build people-to-people contacts, there were jokes about how peace would quickly descend if Madhuri Dixit, an Indian actress popular in Pakistan, was handed over with disputed Kashmir thrown in as dowry.

Recently though, the notion that a bride must bear a substantial dowry received a rude jolt when Nisha Sharma, a 21-year-old software engineer, put down her daintily decorated bridal foot and refused to marry the groom after he demanded a few more extra hundred thousand dollars and a car.

Newspaper pictures of Sharma surrounded by the washing machines, refrigerators, airconditioners and other unpacked consumer goods that her father had already pledged ensured that police acted to book the groom under rarely used laws against dowry, passed by Parliament several decades ago.

''My message to girls is don't marry the man if he demands dowry,'' the spunky Sharma told reporters who have been trooping in and out of her suburban home since she called off the wedding and called in the police early May.

Sharma's courage inspired a wave of similar cases in and around the national capital, in which well-educated brides refused to go through with marriages after the groom or his parents demanded more cash, property or consumer goods.

Anupama Singh, a textile engineering student, refused to accompany her husband of a few hours, Yoginder, after his parents demanded and an extra 150,000 U.S. dollars from her father.

Yoginder escaped arrest on what is a non-bailable offence under Indian law, but only because no complaints were preferred by Anupama or her parents. ''We wanted to give the families a chance to sort out the matter,'' explained police commissioner Praveer Ranjan.

Yet social activists like Ranjana feel that the battle against dowry is far from over. ''People fail to see the powerful economic forces behind dowry arraigned around the fact that marriage in India, particularly arranged ones, is a huge market that has now explosively linked up with consumerism,'' she said in an interview.

She pointed to the pages of matrimonial advertisements in the Sunday editions of leading newspapers, which she says confirm that prospective brides often have little choice when it comes to their partners for life, and that parental influence in the matter is overwhelming.

''If dowry is to disappear, young women need first of all to be better educated and to be able to exercise better choice,'' said Ranjana, who runs the Delhi-based Centre for Social Research (CSR), which handles more than 50 cases of domestic violence daily - most of them dowry-related.

A far worse problem is the permissive attitude that India's deeply patriarchal society and institutions continue to maintain toward dowry-related offences.

Last week, the Delhi High Court made the observation that dowry offences should be made bailable and amenable to compromise between the parties to a marriage, if no grave physical injury is involved.

To the consternation of activists who have been demanding for years that dowry be dealt with in the same way as extortion or blackmail, the court observed that the anti-dowry laws were not only too stiff but were also open to misuse, so that they were ''undermining the foundations of the institution of marriage''.

Said Seba Farooqui, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women: ''The observation of the court seems particularly inappropriate at a time when there is growing realisation that the existing anti-dowry laws have been ineffective in checking this evil.''

Sociologist and historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg observes that the modern-day practice of dowry bears little resemblance to its originally intended role of providing women with a means of personal security when they had little title to land ownership.

In today's India, women continue to have unequal rights to property. But the dowry she gets has become a matter of settling a 'demand' by the groom and his parents to be met by the bride's family -- rather than one of ensuring her security in the absence of title to parental property.

''What happens in most cases is that the dowry a woman carries with her falls into the control of her husband or her in-laws,'' said Ranjana.

One of the worst consequences for Indian society is the growing discrimination against the girl child, who is seen as an economic liability. This is reflected in ever-worsening gender ratios in northern India, where dowry-related abuses and 'accidental' deaths are the staple fare of newspapers.

The last decennial census conducted in 2001 showed that the child sex ratio or the number of girls for every 1,000 boys in the under-six age group had fallen from 945 in 1991 to 927. In northern Haryana and Punjab states, the 2001 census showed that there were just 793 girls for every 1,000 boys.

A nationwide survey on attitudes to dowry conducted last year by the All-India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), which took in 9,000 responses to questionnaires, showed that dowry was at the root of not only female foeticide but most violence related to women.

Interviews by AIDWA with parents of young unmarried women showed that they perceived that dowry has worsened over the last decade, exacerbated by a new consumerist culture fostered by India's rapid globalisation.

''The simple fact is that the giving and taking of dowry is a crime that enjoys wide social sanction among both victims and perpetrators -- that is why it continues to flourish,'' said Brinda Karat, AIDWA general secretary.