That would involve property transactions — both in cash and kind — on a huge scale of real estate, automobile, electronic gizmos, jewellery and currency notes.
The wedding season is also the time of giving and partaking of dowry, about striking out some hard bargains, make-or-break occasion, of some collateral killings — dowry deaths.
The practice of dowry has prevailed, because all kinds of monetary exchanges are usually unreported unless, of course, the groom’s side is unusually extortionate. In 1995 Time Magazine reported that dowry deaths in India increased from around 400 a year in the early 1980s to around 5,800 a year by mid 1990s. According to the UNICEF more then 6,000 bride burnings or other deaths were reported in 1997.
If law could solve this problem, the Dowry Prohibition Act dates way back to 1961 and the more stringent Section 498a of IPC (enacted in 1983) did not achieve the desired result. It often ended up as an unfair tool against innocent men, vulnerable to spurious dowry and torture charges. Using the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 (PWDVA) implemented in 2006, a woman can put a stop to dowry harassment by approaching a domestic violence protection officer.
Manikuntala Sen (a member of the undivided Communist Party of India) recounts in her autobiography (In Search for Freedom) the difficulties faced in the passage of the Dowry Prohibition Act in Parliament in 1961. Ironically, the 1961 Act stipulates both giving and taking dowry as crime, which is considered as a major drawback.
Sen says, “It lies in the hands of women”. She said, women of all classes would have to stand united against unscrupulous men, warning “if women themselves do not stand up against such men, then neither society nor government can protect their honour or their lives”.
Madhu Kishwar, once, while pointing to the inherent flaws in the anti-dowry legislation, tartly commented that “sharp escalation in the amounts of money being spent by families in putting together dowries has contributed to viewing daughters as a burden and consequent devaluation of women’s lives”.
The habit of seeing a woman as a marriageable product to be bartered and exchanged for money and kind and considering marriage the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life is entrenched. Tradition has made this practice so widely acceptable, that the menace of dowry, or the perception that a woman is a financial burden on the family, who must be married off at great and disproportionate cost to the family, is a disincentive to a girl child. This explains the rising number of female foeticides.
Dowry is essentially not a Hindu problem but an illness in all South Asian societies. Dowry-related violence is clearly not just a matter of criminal law or property law. Larger issues such as women’s inheritance rights to property, equal rights and economic empowerment must be taken on board simultaneously. Stringent punishments, social blacklisting might be helpful tools but the mind set had to be changed. Dowry must lose its traditional and social acceptance. In the transaction of souls, ideally, there can be no place for greed.
