WUNRN
India - Court of Women - Dowry Related Violence - Female Infanticide +
By Sakuntala Narasimhan
The Indian Court of
Women held in Bangalore on July 28, 2009, as part of a global series of unique
'courts', or public hearings, on violence against women, initiated by the Asian
Women's Human Rights Council across the world, began with an arresting
enactment of this tradition of the 'cike', with renowned dancer-activist
Mallika Sarabhai following it up with another enactment of an Indian story. She
presented the true but tragic tale of four sisters, aged between 17 and 26
years, who 20 years ago in the state of Kerala - a state enjoying high literacy
and a matriarchal tradition - hanged themselves as their poor parents could not
find them grooms because they could not afford the dowry entailed. Unable to
bear the humiliation of being 'shown' repeatedly to prospective husbands, more
interested in the enticement package, the sisters took their lives.
Two decades on,
despite changes in the law and rise in incomes and literacy levels among women,
the menace of dowry is claiming more lives than ever before. Where once the
annual figures were 400 'dowry deaths' during the 1980s, today official figures
put the number at around 7,800, even though women's groups estimate that the
real figure is closer to 25,000 per year. In
In keeping with the
global tradition of focusing on issues specific to each country, the
While farmers' suicides
have merited frequent media coverage, the court decided to focus on the gender
dimension of this horror in the prosperous states of
With fewer brides
available for marriage, families in many northern states are 'buying' wives
from southern regions. Alternatively, several brothers can even share a woman
if they cannot afford to pay for wives. This commodifies women and results in
trauma for the brides, living isolated lives in distant regions amidst an alien
culture. They have nowhere to turn to for succour when they find themselves
exploited.
Lax enforcement means
that existing legislation does not address this continuum of violence.
Twenty-five women testified at
Siddamma,
Sharifunissa, Malathi, Binapani - whether they were from the north, south, east
or west of India, whether they spoke in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada or
Malayalam (the court offered simultaneous translations to the audience),
whether they were educated or illiterate - all had similar tales of losing a
daughter or sister to dowry, with the perpetrator invariably going unpunished
because there was no "evidence".
This silence, this
failure to speak up collectively as a community and nation against brutal
murders of women in our midst, is what this 'court' process seeks to fight. It
brought private testimonies into the public sphere, in the presence of experts
(judges, activists, academics and bureaucrats) who served as the 'jury' and
offered suggestions for alternative mechanisms that could impart more dignity
to women's lives.
One of the
testimonies was from a qualified medical practitioner from
Six round-table
groups, organised by Vimochana, an activists' group of
Justice V.R.
Krishna Iyer, nonagenarian activist and former Supreme Court judge, went to the
extent of suggesting that July 28 should be declared a "national day of
the death sentence on dowry", while a number of young men stood up to
promise that they would not take a dowry or attend marriages where dowry was
demanded. But as the jury pointed out, dowry is but a symbol of a larger
malaise, a pattern of marriage where the woman's contribution to the family and
society is seen as so worthless that the men have to be "compensated"
for marrying them.
The testimonies
included accounts by some gutsy young women in their twenties and thirties, who
described how they resisted and survived dowry harassment and made new lives
for themselves. These examples could encourage other young women to stand up
against practices that demean them as human beings or measure them in terms of
cars, scooters, refrigerators, TV sets, or hard cash.
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