INDIA’S SUPREME Court has said that no mercy should be shown to those found guilty of burning brides for not bringing an adequate dowry to a wedding.
“In India hundreds of innocent women are being burned to death, it is an uncivilised act. We should hang such persons,” Justices Markandey Katju and Deepak Verma declared in New Delhi this week.
They were responding to an appeal filed by Mahender Gulati against the life sentence handed down to him by the Sessions court in northern Haryana six years ago for burning his wife Rajni in December 2003, for not bringing an adequate dowry.
In her dying declaration Rajni had accused her husband, his older brother and his wife of constantly harassing her and then setting her ablaze after dousing her with paraffin at their home in Bhiwani district.
"People like you need to be hanged. You behave like junglee(wild man)," Justice Katju declared as the petitioners counsel demanded bail for his client.
When the counsel argued that Rajni’s was a case of suicide and not bride burning, Justice Katju remarked “They all say that. Every time they burn a bride they call it suicide.
"On one hand people regard women as devi(goddess), on the other hand they burn them alive. This is against the norms of civilised society. It's barbaric," he stated.
This was one of 8,093 dowry deaths reported in India in 2007, up from 7,618 the previous year according to the latest statistics provided by the National Crime Records Bureau.
In many cases when brides either declined to pay or were simply unable to do so many in-laws, in connivance with their sons, forced the bride into an inflammable nylon sari, doused her with paraffin and set her alight, claiming that she had caught fire whilst cooking.
In the early 1980s such dowry deaths had become so commonplace – up to five a day – that anti-dowry activists forced the government to change prevailing laws stacked against the bride.
Consequently, all such deaths by burning within seven years of marriage were deemed ‘‘unnatural’’ and a case of murder was immediately registered against the husband and his parents. The bride’s dying statement too was treated as inviolate evidence.
“But hundreds of such cases go unreported,” activist lawyer Malavika Rajkotia lamented.