Unlikely Heroine

It takes all kinds to attain fifteen minutes of fame these days.

Twenty-one year old Nisha Sharma, is an engineering student living in India's capital city of New Delhi. OnMay 15, she walked out of her wedding celebrations to phone the police that her prospective husband andwidowed mother were making unjust demands of dowry that included Rs 12 lakh in cash and a fancy car. Thehusband refused to wed her if the lollies were not delivered to him hours before the wedding ceremony. In adramatic move and out of sheer rage the bride phoned the police. The might-have-been husband and his motherare right now cooling their heels in a Delhi clink.

Nisha Sharma now has fame thrust upon her. What's her life like post break-up? `Fans' who laud her`bravery' are thronging her modest home for autographs, foreign media and local ones interview and photographher; local politicians keep calling; there is a rumour of offers to join politics; there is talk about anoffer of a movie being made on her story; a comic strip titled `Brave Girl' will soon be published andBollywood's ancient actors like Sunil Dutt have phoned to congratulate her. Vox polls on the BBC and Indiannewspapers have students gushing about Sharma's `guts' and `courage'. Reports of a couple of more brideswalking out of their marriages over dowry demands in Delhi make Sharma a leader to follow and have bestowedher with cult status.

While we still await some fan to dedicate a statue to Super Girl, it makes sense to pause. Why did Sharmatake time to phone the police just minutes away from the wedding ceremony? Well, it transpires that apart fromthe Rs1.5 lakh rupees that Devdas Sharma, the heroine's father had spent in buying two refrigerators,microwave oven, a TV, and other items of dowry, the final straw, alleged Nisha, was a slap delivered by thegroom's side on her father's cheek for failing to pay up.

Post break-up when she is saying cheese to cameras holding flower vases or looking grim before a tower ofelectronic goods she was meant to take with her as initial dowry or getting felicitated, Sharma blithelyquotes in interviews that, "As far as dowry is concerned, it is up to the bride and her family torefuse" (sic). 

Ergo, demanding dowry is not an offence. It is an issue only when the bride's family is unable to meet thedemands! Now that she is being hailed as the next best thing to take on an ugly social menace, Sharma's fatherrecalls that she'd been always brave. That when she was just two years old she had offered 25 paise to astranger to take her home! With such intelligent remarks and insights comparable to the IQ of a kindergartenstudent, it is amazing that Sharma is the new cause celebre for the Indian media.

However such is the cursed practice of demanding and offering dowry that a prospective bride breaking amarriage over it, even after much water has flown down the Yamuna, is hailed as laudable. In the year 2000,6995 cases of dowry deaths were recorded in India and many go unreported.We just have to cheer ourselves over the fact that if dowry demands in future go beyond the monetary status ofa bride's family, the groom's party can expect the police to visit them.

The moral of the story then seems that we can expect young women to put up with dowry `within limits'. Onlyugly scenes over more dowry would make them take the extreme measure of a break-up of an impending marriage.It is another matter altogether that the modest families like the Sharmas and the Singhs, could even riskmortgage and rustle up hard earned life's savings for a grand wedding and the initial dowry that runs intohundreds of thousands of rupees so that their daughters are sent off with a `proper' wedding.

Such is the burden of a despicable Jurrassic custom that it seems like bad taste to heckle Nisha forwalking out of her wedding, even if she had been a silent party to the dowry being accumulated prior to thewedding.

Alas, if the Dalal family had not delivered the reported slap, or asked for the swank car hours before thewedding ceremony, `brave girl' Nisha Sharma might have taken the initial dowry of Rs 1.5 lakh worth of whitegoods that her father struggled to cough up to her in-laws and might have been honeymooning in peace rightnow.