Deep-rooted Disease

Deep-rooted Disease

By Anjali Modi

The Hindu
…..and there is no clearer sign of this than the rising graph of `dowry deaths'. It spells out the fact that a woman is dispensable if she cannot deliver on dowry demands. Nisha Sharma despite being a dowry giver has become the anti-dowry supergirl only because her story was so unusual in the usual fare of woman who spend their lives being emotionally or physically abused by their husbands and their families or in the most extreme cases simply being killed off. This is a uniquely Indian story.

In the last decade, the official figure for women dying because of dowry-related cruelty has gone up and not down, from 2,500 a year to more than 7,000. The 7,000 figure only reflects the number of cases reported to the police and not nearly the whole story. Even this level of reporting is the result of the campaigns, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by the women's movements which focussed attention on the deaths by fire of married women.
http://www.countercurrents.org/gen-modi250503.htm