By Pankaj Sarma
Clutching her stomach with one hand and holding on to the railing of her verandah with another, Bidisha Sharma tried to ward off her husband’s second kick.
Two years of romance evaporated when Bidisha’s father failed to pay Satish’s demand for a “gift” of Rs 10 lakh to boost his business.
The word “dowry” was never mentioned during their wedding — Satish’s was an “educated” family after all — but the undelivered “little gift” brought a torrent of torture on Bidisha.
Guwahati, Apr 23 : Long tagged as a North Indian malaise, dowry is aggressively invading the Northeast, throwing up alarming figures of death and violence.
Statistics hardly reveal the real story of torture perpetrated behind closed doors, but the numbers are shocking enough.
In Assam for instance, 143 cases of dowry harassment and 3,807 cases of domestic violence have been registered between April 1, 2009 and January 31, 2010.
There have been four “dowry-related” incidents, including two deaths and one alleged attempt to murder, within a week in the state.
A 26-year-old housewife was found dead at her Ulubari residence in Guwahati after alleged dowry torture on April 17. The following day, another housewife was allegedly murdered by her husband for dowry at Noonmati in the city.
Yet another woman, allegedly set on fire by her husband at Fatasil Ambari on April 19, is now battling for life at a private nursing home.
What worries social observers is that dowry is emerging as a trend in the Northeast, which had long been shut to such monetary transactions in marriage.
“Bride burning and atrocities on women were maladies that had afflicted other parts of the country, particularly northern India. Unfortunately, this menace has gradually penetrated into Assamese society as well. Earlier, Assam was untouched by dowry but today it has reared its ugly head here too,” said Sumitra Hazarika, general secretary of the Nirjatan Birodhi Oikya Mancha.
Fifty-odd dowry-related cases have been registered at the all-woman police station since January in Guwahati alone.
Pomy Baruah of Avas Foundation, an NGO, said the cases are only the tip of the iceberg.
“These figures account for only those cases that are reported. There are many dowry-related cases that do not get reported because the victims fear social backlash,’’ she said.
Despite instances like Bidisha’s, the joint secretary of the National Commission for Women, S.S. Pujari, however, said the panel has not received any official complaints of dowry deaths from the region.
Prodded about the Northeast’s traditional respect for women, Monalisa Chankija, editor of Nagaland Page, and winner of the Chameli Devi Jain award for journalism, dismisses it as “nonsense and a lot of public posturing”.
There was a time when it was a shame for a Naga man to even accept a handkerchief from the wife’s family, she said.
“All that the new wife would bring is her loom which showed how industrious she was. All that has now changed; the kind of presents that one sees people giving their daughters is amazing.”
Domestic violence is also rampant in rural Nagaland.
Dowry itself is a relatively new phenomenon in India, beginning sometime in the 20th century, says Prof Samita Sen, director, School of Women Studies, Jadavpur University. Till the end of the 19th century, there was a reverse tradition of “bride price”, she said.
This shift has been caused by modernization and subsequent globalization when domestic economy was washed away by commercial economy where women’s work — household chores — became devalued.
Since no price could be allotted to women’s work, she ceased to be a prize, says Sen.
Agrees Paramita Chakraborty, joint director of the same department. Dowry, she says, is linked to the concept of women’s worth in society or lack of it and her access to property. Hence, the concept rapidly expanded from northern India to include societies and cultures to which dowry was alien.
An officer in the Women’s Grievance Cell of Calcutta police said on an average they receive two to three dowry related complaints against women every month.
She, however, said 48 police stations in the city also receive such complaints regularly.
“They forward us the serious complaints while they investigate the other ones,” she said.
Bihar, which is notorious for its dowry tales, has 50-60 cases registered every year.
But police claim that “misuse” of the Sections 304B and 498A of the Indian Penal Code as a “big reason” for throwing up “inflated figure” of dowry-related deaths and torture in Bihar.
Prabhat Kumar Dwivedi, a Patna high court lawyer, said dowry demand was a social malaise and social initiatives should be taken to end it.
With inputs from Soma Banerjee in Calcutta and Nalin Verma in Patna
