Dowries and Death

                                                                              

As an enlightened and aware Indian citizen you probably read the newspapers, magazines or listen to daily news, all of which tell tales of the magnanimous scale of violence that Indian women in our so called modern society go through every day. India’s classical past and its rich cultural heritage accorded women a designation of honour and a treatment equal as men. But gone are those days of classicism and culture; today as you read about the increasing rate of atrocities and violence inflicted on women, you are perhaps compelled to wonder if we have actually changed for the worst with all the education and modernization the Indians have acquired for themselves. Has modernization given birth to greed given which has awakened the hidden devil within us? 

Being a woman in India is damn challenging; for some women every single day is a battle as they live through lewd remarks, harassment and sexually inappropriate behaviour at the hands of strangers. But what when the torturers are people you call your own, your very family?  One of the most common crimes against women that have existed in our country for many decades is Dowry-related crimes. Dowry crimes are so very rampant in India and they have such a long history that today these crimes are known worldwide as the typical ‘Indian’ crimes. 

Types of Dowry Crimes & Vital Statistics:

Dowry-related crimes can be of many types: wife-bashing and various other sorts of domestic violence inflicted by husband and in-laws on a bride, marital rape, acid throwing, creating emotional trauma on the bride through ceaseless threats, and last but not the least, robbing the bride of her life if their dowry demands are not met.

 When a woman is married off, she spins a web of dreams regarding her new life with her husband in a new family amid her in-laws. But when they treat her inhumanly by battering her, abusing her verbally, torturing her for money and so on, she is made to go through the most harrowing experience of her life. Not only is her world of dreams shattered to a thousand pieces, she might also become prone to depression as our society frowns upon those who lift a finger to accuse their own family and drag them to courts.

The culture of avarice is flourishing in our country, and also increasing is the goriness of the dowry-related crimes. You’ll recoil in terror if you go thorugh the statistics of deaths upon dowry in India. In the year 2012, 8233 newly-wed brides were murdered on the basis of dowry-related issues, as recorded by the country’s National Crime Records Bureau. 

One very noteworthy dowry death that generated ripples all across the nation was that of Pravartika Gupta who was murdered last year. She was charred to death in the bedroom where she was sleeping with her daughter who was just a year old. Her in-laws had threatened her because her parents could not hasten their dowry payment schedules. There was an agreement that her parents will pay an amount of £15,000 in hard cash and will also purchase a Honda City four wheeler for the in-laws. But suddenly they started demanding that her parents should also buy a lavish apartment which was nearly impossible for Pravartika’s parents to afford. As a result, Pravartika was sentenced to an untimely and gruesome death.

Laws against Dowries Meaningless: Why so?

There are laws in place against Dowry in our country, but in spite of that, Dowry crimes continue to play their menacing role. This is because the laws come with many loopholes.  In fact the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act has been proved more or less ineffective due to some fundamental flaws. 

For instance Section-3 of this Act declares dowry system a punishable offence for both dowry taker and dowry giver. Now the dowry giver is always under pressure, he cannot easily lodge a complaint because he doesn’t want to ruin the chances of a prospective wedding for the daughter in the family, and is also scared of encountering legal sanctions. So this clause is a defective one. 

Section 7 of this act declares demand for dowry as a non-cognizable offence, which implies that lodging a complaint for it is mandatory. And for many people, being scared of getting involved in unnecessary legal hassles, wasting time, money and resources are the main reasons for not seeking help. Furthermore, this act declares dowry offence as a bail-able one, which implies that the convict or guilty can be released on anticipatory bail no matter how grave a crime (e.g. bride burning) they have committed.

Changes are Needed

As is obvious, death and dowry go hand in hand because laws in our country are lacking in so many aspects. Two necessary steps that have to undertaken to combat the evils of dowry are: 

1. 1. Dowry laws need to be sterner
2. 2. The judicial procedure pertaining to dowry crimes needs to speed up

Only once these changes are incorporated, will dowry become obsolete in our country, as the in-laws and husband of bride will think twice before committing these inhuman crimes.

The Partial Truth

Every day as you sift through the headlines, you expect to get a quick glimpse of the general political, social and economic state of affairs in the country. But the most common headlines you end up seeing these days are reports of incidents that tell stories of horrendous rape cases & sexual assaults on women taking place all over the country. Even foreign tourists who have always been eager to visit our country and learn more about its culture and heritage are literally discouraged by the news reports on Indian rapes. But even then, do the real stories really come to light? Is there more to these stories that we never find out about?

16^th December Rape case: A shame for the entire nation!

The incidence of rapes in India showed a marked rise since the inhuman 16^th December (2012) Rape Case. It was an inhuman gang rape & murder of a Paramedical student aged just 23 yrs in Delhi, who was gang-raped in a bus when she was on her way back to home after watching a movie with a friend. When the four gang-rapists approached to harass her and begun their lewd behaviour, her friend who worked in a private firm protested and was thrashed badly with iron rod. After the girl was raped, her vaginal passage torn off with the iron rod and her intestines spilling out, she along with her friend were stripped and flung out of the bus to bleed on the streets. This horrific incident of the December 16^th Delhi Gang rape shook the entire nation and received a lot of media hype.

The naked truth revealed:

Not only this one incident, but numerous such brutal incidents that followed in a train after the Delhi rape case reflects one naked truth but a very significant one; i.e. the highest number of rapes in India occur in the Metro cities. The main reason for this is the huge influx of small town population especially women from small towns moving to the big cities to make more money and ending up in a horrible, poverty-stricken life. 

Has anyone ever wondered what the male psychographic behind these rapes is? Psychographic outlines of the men who assault the women in the metros reveal that they are seething with aggression and are often slaves to some kind of addiction, most commonly alcohol or narcotics. However, sometimes this aggression comes from the general attitude of Indian men to dominate females. When these small town girls come to the metro cities and start earning, some are successful – they work long hours and rise on the ladder of success; something most men cannot tolerate or accept. On the other hand, some aren’t so successful and work extra hard to prove themselves, often outshining their male counterparts, which again is unacceptable to a chauvinistic man.  

They feel these girls are intruders in their city, are posing threat to their manhood. They want to teach them a lesson; something that comes from the very core of their conservative nature that tells them a woman can never be better than a man, and they must show a woman that her true place is always beneath a man. Sadly, this aggressive attitude is heightened much when these men are under the effect of some addictive.

Lines blurred between what’s criminal & what’s not:

Recently the four men who raped the Delhi girl have been given a death sentence, though from some sections of the country debate is being raised on the punishment’s quantum as there are some who favour life imprisonment for the convicts. Actually, the horrendous manner in which this poor girl was raped & murdered makes one think that any punishment would fall less for the convicts. 

Today the line between what is ‘criminal’ and what is not has become blurred. Laws in India have a number of loopholes and due to legal deficiencies, non-criminals receive criminal punishments and the real ones are dealt with leniently. Also another way of putting this issue is that today it’s really unpredictable to read a man’s mind. Men with no prior criminal or sexual assault records are often the ones responsible for brutal sexual assault crimes. And as per law, a first time offender is usually given more leeway. 

Significant confessions made by the north Indian perverts: Look into the statistics

After the Delhi Gang rape incident, statistics were collected to see how much this evil of rape has ruined our country. It’s shocking that one out of every four men in Northern India confessed of committing or wanting to commit acts of sexual violence sometime or the other. According to 2011 Rape Statistics, out of 24206 cases of rapes that took place in the country, the maximum cases occurred in Northern India; i.e. about 6227 cases. In rural India too rapes occur, but the only difference is that the cases do not get such great media exposure as in the metros. The victims there are forced to marry their assailants to hush up the matter. In many cases, the illiterate rural women do not even realize that they are being raped!

It can be said that while media is trying its best to bring all rape and sexual assault cases to light so that justice can be served, in all earnestness we still only get a partial picture of the reality. We need to spend less time talking about it, and more time trying to find out WHY rape is becoming so common in India, so that we can find a real solution to the problem.