Who Burnt the Bride?

A letter from a Mr. Yadav from Rajasthan is all over Facebook, accompanied by a photograph of a girl in the midst of some wedding ceremonies who, he says, was his sister who was brutally murdered by her in-laws in Jaipur on 26th January because her parents could not meet their never-ending demands for cash and other things. He says that the authorities have turned a deaf ear to all complaints and the culprits are still at large.

The usual endless rhetoric and rant against dowry seekers and bride-killers has been the inevitable outcome. We are rightly shamed as a society for this commoditization of our marriageable members, where sons continue to be auctioned off to the highest bidder and daughters continue to be regarded as lifelong liabilities, spawning atrocities such as those wreaked on 2 year-old Baby Falak who is currently battling the effects of brutalization at AIIMS, not to mention astronomical rates of female foeticide, still prevalent female infanticide and the horrific sex change surgeries performed on female children in Indore (and in other places too, for all we know) which were brought to public notice by the media last June.

The facts and figures of dowry deaths in our country are horrific and shameful. Despite the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 and its subsequent amendments in 1984 and 1986, the official figure for dowry deaths in the country was 6,500 per year, as reported in 1995. Thereafter, even though domestic violence too has been rendered punishable by law, the incidence of dowry deaths in the country continues to spread like an epidemic, with approximately 25,000 women being murdered every year for dowry, according to unofficial estimates.

However, I have a question here. Why is no one asking how far these women’s own parents and families are responsible for what happens to them? Of course, anyone who murders another person deserves the severest punishment possible, but while we rightly revile the perpetrators of such heinous crimes, why do we let off scott free those who stand by and watch their own daughters or sisters sinking into a morass which they can see is likely to end in murder, especially with all the instances around them?

If a parent throws his crippled child to a ravening wolf, or stands by and watches the wolf devouring his child, trying to placate it with offerings of food, but making no attempt to extract his child from the situation, isn't he, at some level, even more to blame than the wolf? The wolf, of course, needs to be shot. But should there not be some action taken against the parent too?

And that is exactly my question, for these women who get murdered for dowry are usually crippled with regard to empowerment and self-esteem. They are either pushed into these situations, or not rescued from them by their paternal families, or else, emotionally blackmailed into staying by the fear of social repercussions for their parental families.

And so, aren’t these women’s parental families party to these crimes as well? For raising their daughters with the conditioning that by the act of (compulsory) marriage, they relinquish all right to think, feel or fend for themselves—that is, if they had any, even while they were growing up? For feeding, as far as they are able, the fire of their in-laws’ greed, thus helping to propagate the evil that culminates in these women’s brutal murder? For placating the dowry monster with money and material offerings, and choosing to look the other way while their daughters drag out their miserable existence in such surroundings? For not lifting a finger to pull their daughters out of the clutches of such people, simply out of social cowardice, or maybe out of reluctance to disrupt their own lives?

The most ironical part is that even as bride burning statistics scale new heights, divorce rates in India have doubled over the past five years alone, with one marriage in every 1000 collapsing. The situation is symptomatic of the cultural duality typical of a society in a state of flux as it undergoes the transition from traditional values to mores dictated by the demands of contemporary lifestyles.

On one end of the spectrum are couples who seem disinclined t o invest adequate time or effort into their marriages. Statistics say these, for the most part, are ‘techie’ couples—highly qualified, double-income couples with little time or patience to spare from their jet-age lifestyles and a disconnect with traditional values—who seem to prefer to separate amicably rather than put emotional investment into their relationship. Since both partners are professionally, financially and materially self-sufficient and the pressure of traditions non-existent, divorce is virtually a snap decision.

On the other extreme are orthodox households steeped in age-old traditions, where divorce is still a social anathema, where the parents of a girl caught in an unhappy marriage are unwilling to support her even in the face of physical abuse and atrocities, preferring to placate her in-laws with material offerings rather than incur the social odium of their daughter ‘sitting at home’, and where it seems more expedient to the groom’s family to finish off an ‘unsatisfactory’ bride rather than resort to the socially unacceptable solution of a divorce.

While age-old attitudes and perceptions will essentially take time to change, one cannot help but feel that if only the women from such traditional families were brought up to be self-supporting, they might not be subjected to atrocities in the first place, largely because their in-laws would be deterred by the knowledge that if pushed too far, they had the wherewithal to opt out of the marriage without having to depend upon parental support. The parents too might be more supportive if they were unhampered by the fear that bailing their daughter out of an untenable marriage would land her, first on them and later on their sons, as a financial liability for the rest of her life.

In conclusion, I would like to entreat that in cases of bride burning, not only the in-laws of the victims, but also their parental families should come under investigation to determine the extent of their culpability, in feeding the fire of dowry demands on the one hand and coercing their daughters to continue in abusive marriages clearly heading towards catastrophe on the other.

Ultimately, let us not forget that there do exist in our society, numerous women from traditional backgrounds, who have managed to successfully walk away from abusive marriages and make a life for themselves (with or without children) despite parental exhortations to reunite with their abusive marital families, and they are living proof of the power of education and self-esteem.