Nisha Sharma, a 21-year-old Indian bride-to-be, cancelled her wedding in the middle of the festivities and had her fiancee arrested for strong-arming her father for an extra dowry payment. Despite India’s 40-year-old ban on dowries, Miss Sharma’s dad had already come up with televisions, computers, refrigerators, a car and other household goods to give the couple — and an identical lot for the bridegroom’s brother(!) — when, just before the wedding, the groom’s family and friends started roughing her father up for an extra wad of cash.
Miss Sharma’s actions in calling off the marriage are so rare in India that she’s become an instant celebrity. And while it sounds to Western ears that this is a quaint story about nascent feminism in a backwards country, Miss Sharma’s actions take on much more weight when you realize the dangers faced by female children and brides in this country of 1 billion people.
There is a classic Hindu saying, still used today: “…the death of an ox is a misfortune but the death of a girl is a piece of good luck.”
This attitude is common from conception through marriage and childbearing and beyond:
- India has banned antenatal sex-determination and confiscated machines used for determining the sex of a fetus. Too often families who discover that they are pregnant with a daughter choose immediate abortion or foeticide. This pre-birth sex-selection is so widespread that the ratio of female to male children throughout the entire country is 927:1000, while in certain areas “in the northern states of Bihar and Rajasthan the ratio has plummeted to 600:1000, one of the lowest in the world. ” This is especially shocking because worldwide, “the statistical norm is 1,050 females for every 1,000 males”
- In many areas of the country, if the girl baby is born, she is often killed by poison, neglect, smothering, or she is fed unhusked rice (which slices her throat so she bleeds to death), or she is swaddled in a wet towel so she contracts pneumonia. (Read this article, entitled “Born to Die“, for a heartbreaking, unflinching, complex description of these baby-murders.)
- If the girl-child lives beyond infancy, it is less likely that she will be literate than her brothers, less likely that she will attend school, more likely that she will drop out of school if she even attends, and less likely that she will have a job. As far a university education goes, girls account for less than 1/3 of the college population.
- If she makes it to childbearing age, most likely she will suffer from malnutrition and lack of medical care. According to the Hunger Project, “…women must eat last – and eat least. When women are sick, they are much less likely to have access to health care than men. As a result, 60 percent of women of childbearing age in India and Bangladesh are themselves underweight and undernourished.”
- Then comes marriage and the dowry, which has evolved from a method of providing the bride a portion of her family’s property which she was prohibited from inheriting, into a method for selling a daughter in the same way you’d rush to sell a bad investment. Besides paying for an extravagant wedding, the bride’s family is often nearly bankrupted by the extortionate demands of the groom and his family.
- When the wedding is over, the bride’s family are not off the hook. There are frequently additional demands for money, and when these demands are not satisfied, the violence begins. There are uncounted threats, beatings, tortures, imprisonments and impoverishments which go unreported, and often escalate in severity.
- At the extreme, “…the victims are burnt to death—they are doused in kerosene and set light to.” Many of the poorer homes use kerosene for the cooking stoves, and according to UNICEF, “more then 6000 bride burnings or other deaths were reported in 1997.” Many more are not reported. That is 17 women per day, or more than 150 deaths since Nisha Sharma chose a different route for herself.
With all the worldwide attention focused on Nisha Sharma and the (at least) 3 women who have followed in her lead over the past week, I hope this will be the beginning of a change in these medieval practices. Two things lead me to doubt that.
First, there’s already a growing backlash against Nisha, and against the the dowry prohibition itself. A conservative judge recently dismissed charges against several of the groom’s family members in a dowry case, bizarrely claiming that they were the victims, and that, despite the dismal rate of convicitions and prosecutions of dowry cases, he finds that there is “…a growing tendency to come out with inflated and exaggerated allegations roping in each and every relation of the husband and if one happens to be of higher status or of vulnerable standing, he or she becomes an easy prey for better bargaining and blackmailing…” Wonder how much the defendant’s family paid him for that perversion of an already-weak judicial system — and if he was motivated by having a marriageable daughter needing an expensive dowry.
The second reason I am less than hopeful about the prospects of change is contained in the final lines of the first story I read about Nisha Sharma. The reporter writes:
So what does Sharma want? “Whatever my father and uncles choose for me,” she said.
via jong at ambiguous.org]
