Dec

5

The dowry drama goes on…

December 5, 2008 posted by indiatime |

A high court decision in Noida is about to give a new twist to the dowry drama in India. A husband who was jailed for a week on allegations of dowry demands, has now turned the tables on his wife and her family by showing them to be accomplices in the dowry crime. So ther NOida court has now ordered a case to be registered against his wife’s family for aiding and abetting a crime that they had initially said they were the victim of.

A recent decision by the Delhi High Court had already signalled a landmark change by allowing the authorities to go after the dowry-givers, qualifying them to be accomplices more than victims.

Here is the problem. The Delhi court decision makes sense when dowry demands precede the marriage negotiations. So imagine a scenario where the prospective groom and his family demand small or large sums of money to ink the marriage deal. In such cases, the brides’ families that enter such negotiations, are of course aiding and abetting the age old crime.

But in situations where marriage has taken place 5 years ago, and dowry is still being demanded, there is an unfortunate and ill-perceived tendency among the brides’ families, to give in to those demands, just to keep the marriage alive. Although one can still call it aiding and abetting by complying, such aiding and abetting seems to be rather under duress and hardly voluntary.

And then one can find millions of examples of brides’ families giving gifts to the grooms’ families every day. None of those gifts are given under duress, but who can tell the difference between a gift given with pleasure and a gift given under duress? That duress doesn’t have to a demand from the groom. It can be the pressure of the society, the neighbors , the friends, the relatives.

The antidote for social ills like dowry is not going to come from the court system. It will have to be a seed change in our own highly hypocritical society which on one hand makes a grand show of woman goddesses and vande mataram and woman prime ministers and woman presidents; and on the other hand treats women as second class citizens. Even today, in several pockets of India, the life cycle for a female baby starts with the family’s desire to kill it before it is born and ends with the society’s wish that the female jump into her husband’s funeral flames.


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2 Comments so far

  1. Vinoy on December 6, 2008 10:25 am

    Law can’t prevent it.Social awareness is needed to fight the evil.I don’t normally attend marraiges where dowry has been taken and if I have to attend one I refuse to eat anything during the reception telling the host politely that it would be against my principle.This may not be of any help in eradicating the evil but it might make others retrospect about the the evil.This is the least one can do under the circumstances.

  2. Bharati on December 10, 2008 5:36 pm

    In the above case in reality there is no evidence of dowry demand . The only evidence is confession giveing dowry but there is no such evidence of accepting dowry .

    That is why the DP3 is clearly applicable.

    also if you start giving expensive gifts then it is dowry irerespective of the giver trying to call it gift because
    dowry giver giving it with a sneering intention “son in law you cannot afford our daughter’ lifestyle I want her to live”

    Now this is precisely what the crime of dowry giving is . It is not an innocent statement of gifts because volunteary gifts will be small in nature and not run into lakhs upto any upper middle class homes.

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