Society

Fair Sex Or Fair Game?

The recent spate of headline-grabbing cases of dowry violence are but a symptom of a deep-rooted, dark malaise

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Fair Sex Or Fair Game?
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She was just skin and bones, crouching fearfully in a corner, when cops broke open a dingy, stinking room on the terrace of a house in west Delhi last week. An alarmed Jyoti Dhawan hadn’t been expecting rescue. Weighing barely some 20-odd kilos, the 22-year-old had thought death, much before deliverance, would find its way to her hellish cell. After all, nobody, not even her own family, had managed to get to her as she wasted away locked up in this room for the past two years. Forced into solitary confinement by her husband and his parents for falling short of Rs 50,000 on the dowry she’d brought them five years ago. It didn’t matter that Jyoti’s widowed mother, a fourth class government employee, just couldn’t have arranged for more. Whispers Jyoti from her hospital bed: "They’d give me two rotis and some water every alternate day. I’d been eating, defecating, sleeping in that room so long that I lost count of time."

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Shalini Aggarwal, 25, suffered an even more horrendous punishment for not complying with her in-laws’ dowry demands. Her husband shot her dead at point-blank range in their home at Delhi’s Pitampura colony, in the presence of their two-year-old daughter, for a luxury car. Among many other things that comprised her considerable dowry, her industrialist father had given Shalini’s husband Rahul an Opel Astra three years ago. Bored with it after a year, Rahul sold it at a lower price, bought a Honda City and wanted the difference in price to be paid by Shalini’s parents. They would have agreed in time but he lost his patience and shot her. Caught between grieving for Shalini and looking after her grandchild, mother Mohini Dewan regrets having misread the ferocity of the continuing dowry demands. She recalls: "We gave so much at festivals, birthdays, family occasions. They’d still taunt her on how it was insufficient. But we never thought it would end like this. We knew dowry deaths happen but we didn’t think they happened in families like ours."

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Yes, the past two months have truly seen the media flashing many an incident of torture and death related to dowry. Despite the awareness, laws, women’s cells, a strong feminist movement, headlines jolted us yet again. Into the realisation that a most non-reciprocal, asymmetric and extractive relationship between the genders thrives in our society; across religions, castes and social strata. News that tells us of harassment and death at the hands of avaricious in-laws that happen both in lower middle class homes like Jyoti’s and affluent ones like Shalini’s. Reports of prominent citizens like cricketer Gyanendra Pandey assaulting his wife for not bringing in sufficient dowry. Reports from small towns like Bhilai in Madhya Pradesh where four sisters hanged themselves last month to relieve their family of the burden of arranging dowry. Statistics that show the top-security Tihar Jail in the capital swelling with women convicted for murdering their daughters-in-law-70 until last year, they are now 95.

These horrific stories, toppling over each other for attention, might prompt us into thinking that there’s a spurt in dowry violence. But there’s danger in harbouring such a notion. Because it ignores the fact that the fires of dowry have been raging and consuming our women continuously each year, year after year. The last recorded figure for dowry deaths in the country, in fact, stands at a disgracefully high 6,917 for 1998, 15 per cent higher than such deaths the previous year. For a more recent statistical indication as to the ascendancy of this crime, the National Commission for Women (NCW) has registered 338 dowry deaths in the past 10 months alone-over one death a day, and this only in the few north Indian states with access to the Delhi-based commission.

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The fact is that we seem to have become so desensitised to atrocities related to dowry that till it takes on absolutely hideous dimensions, till thrust before our eyes headline after headline, we don’t take notice.

This, when dowry is taking on hugely gaudy proportions and, in turn, increasingly emphasising the role of woman as property. This, even in communities which traditionally did not believe in dowry-like in Assam-where dowry deaths are being reported today. And getting firmly institutionalised in many states like Bihar where upward of 30 dowry deaths have been recorded over the last one and a half months. As Patna-based social activist Saroj Choubey points out: "There are socially acceptable fixed rates here now. An ias officer has a price tag of Rs 10 lakh and upwards to no limits. Doctors and engineers start at Rs 7-8 lakh and could go up to Rs 25 lakh. Why, even a government-employed peon isn’t available for less than Rs 2 lakh in Bihar!"

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Earlier known as streedhan (woman’s property), to be used and transferred to people of her choice, dowry was a form of inheritance for women in a land-dominated, agrarian economy. Today, it’s come to mean not only gold, clothes and utensils but lavish weddings, consumer goods like vehicles and TV sets and even cash for the groom’s education or business. Worryingly, anti-dowry laws have only driven the practice underground. Because there is no social base for confrontation and as a social practice it continues to more than ever before legitimise the commodification of women. Now the negotiations, often, begin after marriage-unlike earlier, where the talks were before the event and with the biradari, the brokers within the family, monitoring the process. And worse, the transactions do not end with marriage but continue through births of children, festivals, visits or plain demand.

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Like the claims that Lucknow-based cricketer Gyanendra Pandey kept making on his in-laws through the four years of his marriage. They did try to fulfill all his demands. "It started with his ordering for a scooter right after marriage. Rs 5 lakh for the marriage, Rs 2 lakh to pay a county match, besides sundry other demands. We depleted all our resources so that he wouldn’t ill-treat our daughter," says the mother of the bride. But that’s wishful thinking. Last week, Pandey thrashed his wife Pratibha black and blue, till neighbours came rushing in after hearing her bloodcurdling cries of pain. He was arrested, she’s still recuperating under sedation in her maternal home in Kanpur. And all Gyanendra chooses to say is, "These are personal squabbles. What matters most is that I want my wife and child back."

And many battered, bruised wives do stay on in such abusive relationships. Partly fearing social repercussions and shame at a broken marriage, partly believing they can work things out. Like Patna’s Nisha Kumari, whose grasping husband kept asking for more. He beat her so badly that she had to go in for an eye and later ear surgery. Denied food, she soon fell prey to TB. Still, Nisha says, she was ready to live with her husband, till he left her. He works in Rajasthan now but continues to make demands through letters and phone.

It never ceases, this burning greed that kills when frustrated. Just a month ago, Usha Rani succumbed to burn injuries in a Bangalore hospital. Her milk-vendor husband Janardhan had insisted her father write over all his immovable property to Usha. Like Janardhan, Julie’s unemployed husband was dissatisfied with the Rs 3 lakh she brought with her when they were married last April. This April, she suffered an excruciatingly painful death in the Patna Medical College and Hospital. Julie was gagged and torched alive by her husband and mother-in-law. "I had taken so much loan already to get her married, I couldn’t have paid up any more," cries Birendra Kumar, Julie’s father, a junior engineer with the police department.

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Dr Shanti Ojha, author of Dahej Hatyayen Doshi Kaun? (Dowry Deaths: Who’s the Culprit?), estimates that cases of physical, mental and emotional torture that many women face from demanding in-laws are at least three times higher than dowry deaths. The first three months of this year saw 206 women coming to the NCW with complaints of dowry harassment. Says commission chairperson Vibha Parthasarthy: "As more women become aware of their legal rights and find their voices against the violence of dowry, they’re screaming to be heard. In turn, there’s a tremendous backlash from the insecure male. More frustrated than ever before, the violence he’s perpetrating is now vicious as it never has been."

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And what’s being done to check this? "We try resuming dialogue between both families, getting the wife back to her marital home and counselling sense into parties feuding over dowry payment," offers D.T. Barde, in charge of Delhi’s Crime Against Women cell. But the cop admits that the most effective part of police intervention in dowry-related cases is "putting such fear of god in the groom’s family that they stop ill-treating the girl at once".

But those who’ve experienced it first-hand vouch that the masculinist ideology which pervades the ranks of the police trivialises women’s suffering at every stage of launching a complaint. Assuming one can cross this hurdle and get to the courts, another struggle confronts the dowry victim. Or whoever seeks justice on her behalf. Like for Satya Rani Chaddha, 75. Only last week did she receive justice for her daughter’s gruesome dowry death, after a 21-year legal battle. Six months pregnant, Shashibala was set ablaze by her husband in 1979 as her parents did not oblige him with a scooter. Enraged, her mother launched a fight for justice that saw her set up Shakti Shalini, a shelter and help centre for women going through dowry harassment. "All the while also struggling with lawyers’ strikes, absentee judges, court vacations and an indifferent judiciary," she recalls. "My daughter’s murderer, in the meantime, remarried, had children, lived a normal life." Seven years’ imprisonment after 21 years... Satya Rani isn’t happy.

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Calling the Dowry Prohibition Act "toothless", a Joint House Committee on the spiralling atrocities against women in Karnataka submitted its report to the J.H. Patel government last year. It recommended a new investigative machinery and special courts to try such cases. Pramila Nesagri, who headed the committee, says: "The place where the incident occurred, the witness statements and even the post mortem should be videotaped so that evidence cannot later be tampered with."

As it happens now. According to Donna Fernandes of Vimochana, an NGO working towards defending women’s right to live, "there’s a collective conspiracy at all levels to get the accused in dowry cases acquitted." She points to the poor conviction rate: of 577 such cases in three years in Karnataka, only 22 have ended in convictions.

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The last two years have seen Vimochana collecting figures from the Bangalore police regarding the unnatural deaths of married women in the city. Says Fernandes, "We were stunned to find about 100 women die every month in the city alone and that 70 per cent of these deaths are registered as due to stove bursts, cooking accidents and so on." So, last August, the NGO set up a Truth Commission for Women, comprising former justices, representatives of the Law Commission, legal experts and academicians. All facts and lapses of investigation in select cases of sudden and unnatural deaths of newly-married women were placed before this commission.

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But very few such exercises are carried out. It is surprising, in fact, that the eradication of dowry doesn’t enjoy either the enthusiasm or the funding available to many other feminist causes. Jaipur-based activist Kavita Srivastav of the Mahila Atyachar Virodhi Janandolan offers an explanation: "The tedium and the grind of the day-to-day case work for dowry is too much. It takes counselling, monitoring investigation, court watch, providing shelter sometimes and media advocacy to help every dowry victim attain justice. Few have the money, time, energy to take on that much responsibility. Not only dowry, very few activists seem to be working on violence against women per se".

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And yet there’s so much of it in Indian homes. A study by Leela Visaria, released by the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) last September, had 66 per cent of women respondents from five villages in central Gujarat report some form of psychological, physical or sexual abuse. Seventy-five per cent of newly-married women experienced abusive behaviour from their husbands. Says ICRW’s Anuradha Rajan: "Despite its widespread prevalence, domestic violence comes to light only when connected with dowry. Otherwise, it’s seen as an ordinary way of resolving domestic issues."

Beaten and burnt, then, India’s women continue to survive somehow in their marital homes. It could change but that would mean delinking property ownership from marriage and ensuring parents do not disinherit daughters. Says Dr Ojha, "Today, girls only have ‘death rights’, they can avail a share in their fathers’ and husbands’ property only when the men die. What can be more unequal or unfair?" Being torched alive for dowry perhaps.

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