20 May 2003
NEW DELHI - Indian software engineer student Nisha Sharma’s decision to call off her wedding over a last-minute dowry demand has catapulted her to fame, drawn scores of marriage proposals and prompted an outcry against the outlawed practice.
The 21-year-old woman alerted police last week when her schoolteacher groom made a dowry demand of 1.2 million rupees (25,000 dollars) a couple of hours before the wedding ceremony.
The groom was promptly arrested and put in jail, bringing howls of outrage from his family but widespread praise for Sharma from other prospective brides, two of whom followed suit in the following days and had their own grooms arrested.
Demanding a dowry, or gifts of cash and commercial goods, by the family of the groom is common in India’s male-dominated society but the custom was banned by law in the 1980s and is punishable by a jail term.
Brides’ families usually succumb to the dowry arm-twisting as cancelling marriages is considered a taboo for women and leaves them scarred socially, making it difficult for them to marry.
Newspapers have splashed pictures of Sharma and her family sitting near a pile of expensive gifts such as television sets, refrigerators and keys to a car which were wedding gifts intended for the groom.
“I was not afraid of what I was doing because I knew that it would boost my image if I took a stand against the dowry demand,” said Sharma, a final year student.
Sharma’s action has also won her praise from India’s junior home minister I.D. Swami, and her home in Noida, on the edge of Delhi, has been buzzing with high-profile visitors such as MPs and representatives of women’s organisations.
She has reportedly even received an offer from a local political party to contest elections, although she has said her main goal is to finish her studies.
Local newspapers said that Sharma has been flooded with marriage proposals from men, some from as far afield as Afghanistan, who say they will be “proud to marry a girl like her.”
“If more greedy grooms are sent off, the material incentives of dowry will need to be balanced with the disincentive of the social humiliation,” the Statesman newspaper wrote in an editorial titled ”Bravo Nisha”.
“In reality, neither liberal education nor wealth has made a difference to the custom: Indian men sent to Ivy League universities by their fathers come back thinking their price has gone up.”
It said the ultimate responsibility for taking action lay with those who were “aggrieved” by the ancient practice.
Thousands of Indian women are tortured and many even suffer gruesome deaths at the hands of their in-laws every year for not fulfilling dowry demands. A report in the Times of India newspaper on dowry showed that professional well-qualified grooms such as doctors, bankers and even college lecturers have price tags ranging from three million to 200,000 rupees (64,000 to 4,300 dollars).
Social activists say that part of the reason the custom continues is that parents of brides-to-be are willing to shell out large sums of money to win an influential and wealthy son-in-law.
Police say the case could transform their fight against dowry as it could encourage more and more brides’ families to lodge complaints in cases of harassment for money.
