DOWRY DEATHS
SATYA CHADDA: My daughter was a graduate. Got her married on the 4th May. All my neighbours used to say would bring luck to her husbands home. She would build a golden home. And on the 17th March 1979 her in laws burnt her to death.
DOCTOR RANJANA KUMARI (AUTHOR OF BRIDES ARE NOT FOR BURNING): I think it is the most heinous and most brutal form of crime is where woman are being burnt for the want of consumer goods. We are very very troubled by this, that why it is happening like this in our country. That women are being burnt, women are being deserted, tortured, harassed for demand of dowry.
The figures say that somewhere in India every one hour and 40 minutes a woman is killed by husband or in-laws who are consumed by greed. They’re called dowry deaths.
Now the fact that almost five thousand women die every year in this way is bad enough, but people in Delhi will tell you each victim is merely a symptom of a far deeper social malaise.
India today is changing so fast that its cherished traditions and cultures can no longer keep up - and it’s easy to understand that India’s women say they have become the first casualties.
Neelum is 26 years old and she’s on her way to be sexually harassed.
It’s all in a day’s work - she’s a police officer and she knows how to look after herself.
NEELUM: I’m a brown belt....
In Delhi, sexual harassment - they call it Eve Teasing here - has got so out of hand that each day women police decoys are sent out to catch people at it.
It’s not a difficult job: with senior plainclothes police waiting in the background, Neelum and her friend, Veena, need only wait by any bus stop.
Within minutes a businessman has stopped to ask Neelum if she’ll go to bed with him.
A plainclothes man grabs the ignition keys to stop the driver escaping.
She wants the man to show remorse... in an Indian manner he would well remember from his school days.
NEELUM: Hold your ears! Quick hold them, do it with both hands. Hold your ears and do sit-ups.Are you doing it or not! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, doing such a thing at your age.
VEENA (Neelum’s friend): Your kids must be my age. Why did you stop the car?
For Neelum and her inspector, Eve Teasing is merely the very public face of a far more insidious evil... the widespread and routine abuse of Indian women within their own homes and at the hands of their own families.
Anita is 24 years old and she’s run away from her husband’s home after four years of constant beatings.
ANITA: In the beginning they were good to me but then all that started to change. They ask for more dowry: “Why didn’t you bring a gas stove, or a fridge, or a TV. Nothing.“
When it became obvious her parents had no more dowry to give, the beatings escalated until she lived in fear that her in-laws would kill her so that her husband could marry again and earn another dowry.
ANITA: They used to say your family can’t help you. Just like your uncle’s daughter was burnt to death, so we will burn you and your family will not be able to do anything.
DOCTOR RANJANA KUMARI: Dowry has not been a form of pressure on the family earlier, it has come now with more and more consumerism - I see a direct relationship with what is happening now and the consumerism.
Another word for consumerism in this context is, of course, avarice... an avarice that amongst the poor and the middle class has run amok
Where once dowry was seen as a girl’s inheritance - in recent decades in-laws have assumed an inherent right to keep it for themselves.
MATAJI: We hadn’t met these people before, someone tricked us into the marriage.
For Mataji, an impoverished widow, it means a life-long debt incurred raising enough dowry for the marriage of her two daughters to two brothers they had never met in a far-off village.
I gave a lot but you can’t keep giving all your life - how much can you give.
When she could pay no more the beatings started.
What did you do and what did you feel when you started to hear that your daughters were being beaten and that their husbands were demanding money from you.
MATAJI: I cried a lot, I wept and wept. I spoilt my eyesight, I spoilt my health by constant weeping.
MATAJI’S DAUGHTER: They started saying you didn’t bring this and you didn’t bring that, they kept asking for things, - dowry, a tractor or scooter, or anything.
Downstairs, too ashamed to show her face or reveal her name, one of Mataji’s daughters tells of the beatings she received over three years....
She got stitches because the stick had nails on it and the nails tore her skin. The doctor had to give her stitches.
REPORTER: And who did this to them?
MATAJI’S DAUGHTER: Mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, all of them.
TRANSLATOR: And your husband?
MATAJI’S DAUGHTER: My husband too.
DOCTOR KUMARI: People don’t want to report it.
REPORTER: Nobody wants to talk about it?
DOCTOR KUMARI: Nobody wants to tell people that this is what happened in my family, because of the stigma and the people who do it naturally are trying to hide it because it is a crime by law and they can be punished so they don’t want it to be known. The girl’s family don’t want it to be known because it is a stigma for the other girls in the family. How will they get married and what will happen to them that’s the thing that keeps it hidden.
OM PRAKASH: Ask her if the TV has ever been turned on, or her cooking pots used, or her fridge used. Ask her what has been used, even the washing machine is still packed away.
Dowries are the cause of such conflict that special Women’s Police Units have been set up to deal with them.
OM PRAKASH: Now she claims that I demanded 200,000 rupees for dowry.
Inspector Prem Lata has seen and heard it all before - countless times.
OM PRAKASH: Don’t claim something that’s not true
RAJARI PRAKASH: Madam, he comes up with new things every day, does he ever say the right thing.
POLICE MAN:Where are you from....what has happened to you. My husband has married for a second time.
PREM KUMARI: Downstairs 25 year old Prem Kumari has finally screwed up enough courage to complain ... but she’s terrified.
POLICE WOMAN: Put in your application, we will do the right thing by you. Our officers are very good, they deal very well with the cases so you can talk to them.
Prem’s plight is deadly serious ... not only is she facing disgrace, but her bigamous husband - who now controls her entire worldly wealth - has thrown her out on the streets.
PREM KUMARI: They said get 50,000 rupees, we want to build a house, then they beat me up and asked for 50,000 rupees again and turned me out of the house and said I’ll kill you if you don’t get it.
What I’m, really wondering is the lack of high status in Indian society.
If women rise up in society, get educated and independent that would improve the status of women.
You need education and self dependence - that could be the solution to the problem.
Married for six months, Om and Ranjari have spent three of them fighting over the dowry - and especially about whatever happened to her jewellery ...
OM PRAKASH: I don’t have the jewellery, she took it when she left my house three or four months ago.
RANJARI PRAKESH: I don’t have the jewellery, I never had it, he took it off me on the first night of the marriage.
REPORTER: Do they think there will be a reconciliation.
OM PRAKESH: Yes I’m sure, I’m sure it will be settled.
RANJARI PRAKESH: From my point of view I feel it will not be settled.
Marriage in India has always been more a business affair between families than an affair of the heart - love rarely comes into it.
REPORTER: With love marriages would you expect to have the same problem?
DOCTOR KUMARI: I think its not there, it’s much less, with love marriages. I would say there is a hundred cases, only 99 there is no dowry given or taken, maybe 1% you hear about.
So has the idea of an arranged marriage outlived its usefulness in India?
DOCTORE KUMARI: You can’t say that, you can’t say that when 99% of people are practicing it.
Despite the increasing complications and self-evident dangers of traditional marriage in a modern India, people of all classes cling to it still.
Jyoti is 20 ... a modern young woman... a university graduate... a fashion designer by profession.
Her parents are considering a marriage proposal, passed on through distant relatives, from a family they do not know.
SWAMI RAJ: date of birth...
Like 98% of Indians, one of the first things Jyoti’s parents do is consult an astrologer about the proposal.
Mr PAUL: This whole exercise is aimed at only one thing - more compatibility, harmony and success of the marriage bond for that process traditionally we go for this process that is matchmaking.
Swami Raj is one of India’s best known astrologers - but steeped through he is in tradition, he has now come to doubt the wisdom of arranged marriages.
SWAMI RAJ BALDEV: So this arranged marriage without the proper consent of the boy and the girl proves injurious and damaging later on because there should be a natural liking... because now that things have changed in my opinion that the consent of the girl is a must .. arranged marriages more of a problem.. there should be freedom, there should be freedom.
Freedom to chose a husband is still unthinkable in most of rural India where a woman is a chattel.Yet in the cities where young women like Jyoti are beguiled by the freedom to question and to challenge, they too remain bound by traditions of filial obedience.
When Jyoti was just two years old, Satya Cadda’s daughter died.
She was burnt to death.
WOMAN: This photograph is my daughter... 24 years old..
For 18 years, Satya has been driven almost mad by grief and by despair that her son-in-law escaped scott free and earned a new dowry by marrying again.
SATYA: I the undersigned mother murdered by mother...
After 18 years, her case is still in the courts .. with no end in sight.
SATYA: The fault is neither mine nor society’s. The fault is in our legal system that doesn’t let this case be resolved. I lay the blame fully on Indian law. I blame the supreme court and the parliament (mimics) those who make big claims in their speeches “this is what I am doing”.
DOCTOR RANJANI KUMARI: There are so many cases there’s not been a single judgment except for one case where the culprits have really been punished. What the women’s organisations have achieved is to pressurise the police to at least register these cases, to acknowledge them as crime cases. But small town police are not interested. They consider it a household matter, the police doesn’t intervene.
Since Satya’s daughter died, at least another 80 thousand other young women have been killed by their husbands and in-laws.Dowry deaths have become India’s great unpunished crime.
SATAYA CHADDA: There is talk about women’s rights, women’s rights, women’s rights, what women’s rights? Why can’t we have women’s rights in our country... What’s going to happen to the women of this country? Day and night there are rapes, there is incest between father and daughter what is this! What women’s rights?
The people say that when the flood has washed the field away, what can you do? That flood is eating away at India. The protectors are turning aggressors.
SATYA CHADDA: My daughter was a graduate. Got her married on the 4th May. All my neighbours used to say would bring luck to her husbands home. She would build a golden home. And on the 17th March 1979 her in laws burnt her to death.
DOCTOR RANJANA KUMARI (AUTHOR OF BRIDES ARE NOT FOR BURNING): I think it is the most heinous and most brutal form of crime is where woman are being burnt for the want of consumer goods. We are very very troubled by this, that why it is happening like this in our country. That women are being burnt, women are being deserted, tortured, harassed for demand of dowry.
The figures say that somewhere in India every one hour and 40 minutes a woman is killed by husband or in-laws who are consumed by greed. They’re called dowry deaths.
Now the fact that almost five thousand women die every year in this way is bad enough, but people in Delhi will tell you each victim is merely a symptom of a far deeper social malaise.
India today is changing so fast that its cherished traditions and cultures can no longer keep up - and it’s easy to understand that India’s women say they have become the first casualties.
Neelum is 26 years old and she’s on her way to be sexually harassed.
It’s all in a day’s work - she’s a police officer and she knows how to look after herself.
NEELUM: I’m a brown belt....
In Delhi, sexual harassment - they call it Eve Teasing here - has got so out of hand that each day women police decoys are sent out to catch people at it.
It’s not a difficult job: with senior plainclothes police waiting in the background, Neelum and her friend, Veena, need only wait by any bus stop.
Within minutes a businessman has stopped to ask Neelum if she’ll go to bed with him.
A plainclothes man grabs the ignition keys to stop the driver escaping.
She wants the man to show remorse... in an Indian manner he would well remember from his school days.
NEELUM: Hold your ears! Quick hold them, do it with both hands. Hold your ears and do sit-ups.Are you doing it or not! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, doing such a thing at your age.
VEENA (Neelum’s friend): Your kids must be my age. Why did you stop the car?
For Neelum and her inspector, Eve Teasing is merely the very public face of a far more insidious evil... the widespread and routine abuse of Indian women within their own homes and at the hands of their own families.
Anita is 24 years old and she’s run away from her husband’s home after four years of constant beatings.
ANITA: In the beginning they were good to me but then all that started to change. They ask for more dowry: “Why didn’t you bring a gas stove, or a fridge, or a TV. Nothing.“
When it became obvious her parents had no more dowry to give, the beatings escalated until she lived in fear that her in-laws would kill her so that her husband could marry again and earn another dowry.
ANITA: They used to say your family can’t help you. Just like your uncle’s daughter was burnt to death, so we will burn you and your family will not be able to do anything.
DOCTOR RANJANA KUMARI: Dowry has not been a form of pressure on the family earlier, it has come now with more and more consumerism - I see a direct relationship with what is happening now and the consumerism.
Another word for consumerism in this context is, of course, avarice... an avarice that amongst the poor and the middle class has run amok
Where once dowry was seen as a girl’s inheritance - in recent decades in-laws have assumed an inherent right to keep it for themselves.
MATAJI: We hadn’t met these people before, someone tricked us into the marriage.
For Mataji, an impoverished widow, it means a life-long debt incurred raising enough dowry for the marriage of her two daughters to two brothers they had never met in a far-off village.
I gave a lot but you can’t keep giving all your life - how much can you give.
When she could pay no more the beatings started.
What did you do and what did you feel when you started to hear that your daughters were being beaten and that their husbands were demanding money from you.
MATAJI: I cried a lot, I wept and wept. I spoilt my eyesight, I spoilt my health by constant weeping.
MATAJI’S DAUGHTER: They started saying you didn’t bring this and you didn’t bring that, they kept asking for things, - dowry, a tractor or scooter, or anything.
Downstairs, too ashamed to show her face or reveal her name, one of Mataji’s daughters tells of the beatings she received over three years....
She got stitches because the stick had nails on it and the nails tore her skin. The doctor had to give her stitches.
REPORTER: And who did this to them?
MATAJI’S DAUGHTER: Mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, all of them.
TRANSLATOR: And your husband?
MATAJI’S DAUGHTER: My husband too.
DOCTOR KUMARI: People don’t want to report it.
REPORTER: Nobody wants to talk about it?
DOCTOR KUMARI: Nobody wants to tell people that this is what happened in my family, because of the stigma and the people who do it naturally are trying to hide it because it is a crime by law and they can be punished so they don’t want it to be known. The girl’s family don’t want it to be known because it is a stigma for the other girls in the family. How will they get married and what will happen to them that’s the thing that keeps it hidden.
OM PRAKASH: Ask her if the TV has ever been turned on, or her cooking pots used, or her fridge used. Ask her what has been used, even the washing machine is still packed away.
Dowries are the cause of such conflict that special Women’s Police Units have been set up to deal with them.
OM PRAKASH: Now she claims that I demanded 200,000 rupees for dowry.
Inspector Prem Lata has seen and heard it all before - countless times.
OM PRAKASH: Don’t claim something that’s not true
RAJARI PRAKASH: Madam, he comes up with new things every day, does he ever say the right thing.
POLICE MAN:Where are you from....what has happened to you. My husband has married for a second time.
PREM KUMARI: Downstairs 25 year old Prem Kumari has finally screwed up enough courage to complain ... but she’s terrified.
POLICE WOMAN: Put in your application, we will do the right thing by you. Our officers are very good, they deal very well with the cases so you can talk to them.
Prem’s plight is deadly serious ... not only is she facing disgrace, but her bigamous husband - who now controls her entire worldly wealth - has thrown her out on the streets.
PREM KUMARI: They said get 50,000 rupees, we want to build a house, then they beat me up and asked for 50,000 rupees again and turned me out of the house and said I’ll kill you if you don’t get it.
What I’m, really wondering is the lack of high status in Indian society.
If women rise up in society, get educated and independent that would improve the status of women.
You need education and self dependence - that could be the solution to the problem.
Married for six months, Om and Ranjari have spent three of them fighting over the dowry - and especially about whatever happened to her jewellery ...
OM PRAKASH: I don’t have the jewellery, she took it when she left my house three or four months ago.
RANJARI PRAKESH: I don’t have the jewellery, I never had it, he took it off me on the first night of the marriage.
REPORTER: Do they think there will be a reconciliation.
OM PRAKESH: Yes I’m sure, I’m sure it will be settled.
RANJARI PRAKESH: From my point of view I feel it will not be settled.
Marriage in India has always been more a business affair between families than an affair of the heart - love rarely comes into it.
REPORTER: With love marriages would you expect to have the same problem?
DOCTOR KUMARI: I think its not there, it’s much less, with love marriages. I would say there is a hundred cases, only 99 there is no dowry given or taken, maybe 1% you hear about.
So has the idea of an arranged marriage outlived its usefulness in India?
DOCTORE KUMARI: You can’t say that, you can’t say that when 99% of people are practicing it.
Despite the increasing complications and self-evident dangers of traditional marriage in a modern India, people of all classes cling to it still.
Jyoti is 20 ... a modern young woman... a university graduate... a fashion designer by profession.
Her parents are considering a marriage proposal, passed on through distant relatives, from a family they do not know.
SWAMI RAJ: date of birth...
Like 98% of Indians, one of the first things Jyoti’s parents do is consult an astrologer about the proposal.
Mr PAUL: This whole exercise is aimed at only one thing - more compatibility, harmony and success of the marriage bond for that process traditionally we go for this process that is matchmaking.
Swami Raj is one of India’s best known astrologers - but steeped through he is in tradition, he has now come to doubt the wisdom of arranged marriages.
SWAMI RAJ BALDEV: So this arranged marriage without the proper consent of the boy and the girl proves injurious and damaging later on because there should be a natural liking... because now that things have changed in my opinion that the consent of the girl is a must .. arranged marriages more of a problem.. there should be freedom, there should be freedom.
Freedom to chose a husband is still unthinkable in most of rural India where a woman is a chattel.Yet in the cities where young women like Jyoti are beguiled by the freedom to question and to challenge, they too remain bound by traditions of filial obedience.
When Jyoti was just two years old, Satya Cadda’s daughter died.
She was burnt to death.
WOMAN: This photograph is my daughter... 24 years old..
For 18 years, Satya has been driven almost mad by grief and by despair that her son-in-law escaped scott free and earned a new dowry by marrying again.
SATYA: I the undersigned mother murdered by mother...
After 18 years, her case is still in the courts .. with no end in sight.
SATYA: The fault is neither mine nor society’s. The fault is in our legal system that doesn’t let this case be resolved. I lay the blame fully on Indian law. I blame the supreme court and the parliament (mimics) those who make big claims in their speeches “this is what I am doing”.
DOCTOR RANJANI KUMARI: There are so many cases there’s not been a single judgment except for one case where the culprits have really been punished. What the women’s organisations have achieved is to pressurise the police to at least register these cases, to acknowledge them as crime cases. But small town police are not interested. They consider it a household matter, the police doesn’t intervene.
Since Satya’s daughter died, at least another 80 thousand other young women have been killed by their husbands and in-laws.Dowry deaths have become India’s great unpunished crime.
SATAYA CHADDA: There is talk about women’s rights, women’s rights, women’s rights, what women’s rights? Why can’t we have women’s rights in our country... What’s going to happen to the women of this country? Day and night there are rapes, there is incest between father and daughter what is this! What women’s rights?
The people say that when the flood has washed the field away, what can you do? That flood is eating away at India. The protectors are turning aggressors.