jaipur:
Before the three sisters and their children were found dead in a well, they left a message blaming the family they had married.
Kalu, Kamlesh and Mamta Meena were the victims of a dispute over dowries, the often high sums paid by Indian parents to marry off their daughters.
The sisters had married brothers from the same household and lived under the same roof, but, according to the trio’s grieving relatives, they faced constant violence from their husbands and in-laws.
They were constantly mistreated, they say, even when their father did not comply with the demand for more money.
All three were found dead last month near their matrimonial home, a village on the outskirts of Jaipur, along with Kalu’s four-year-old son and baby. Both Kamlesh and Mamta were pregnant.
“We don’t want to die, but death is better than their abuse,” reads a WhatsApp message left by one of the sisters after their disappearance, a cousin said.
“Our in-laws are the reason behind our deaths. We die together because it’s better than dying every day.”
Authorities are currently investigating and treating the deaths as suicides, a senior Jaipur police officer told AFP.
The sisters’ distraught father, Sardar Meena, said life had been hell for his daughters, whose husbands forbade them from continuing their education and constantly harassed them for more payments.
“We had already given them so many things, you can see them in their house,” he told AFP, counting down the beds, TV sets and fridge he had given to the family.
“I am the father of six girls, there is a limit to how much I can give,” added Sardar, who earns a meager income as a farmer.
“I had raised them and doing just that was hard.”
Police have arrested the three husbands, their mother and a sister-in-law on charges of dowry intimidation and marital maltreatment.
AFP’s attempts to contact the men’s families were unsuccessful.
‘Dignity of the family’
India banned the practice of paying dowries more than 60 years ago, and harassment or extortion of the payments is a criminal offence.
But the custom persists, especially in rural areas, supported by social conventions that treat women as an economic burden and demand compensation for accepting them as brides.
Local news outlets regularly report marital property disputes ending in murder.
Last year, a man in the southern state of Kerala was sentenced to life in prison after using venomous snakes to kill his wife and take complete control of their property, including a new car and 500,000 rupees ($6,500) that her family identified as dowry had provided.
Courts have also handed down sentences in their handling of dowry harassment, with a man in Kerala being sentenced to 10 years in prison last month after his payment requests were charged with inciting his wife to commit suicide.
A pervasive taboo surrounding divorce – only one in 100 Indian marriages end in dissolution – has prevented married women from considering escaping violent situations.
For the Meena sisters, leaving was never seen as an option, even though their relatives were aware of the violence.
“Once they got married, we thought they should stay in their matrimonial homes to maintain the dignity of the family,” Sardar said.
“If we had them remarried in another house, and if that situation turned out to be worse, what shall we do? We lose face.”
‘End of the Road’
India’s National Crime Records Bureau recorded nearly 7,000 dowry-related homicides in 2020 – about 19 women a day.
The same agency reported that more than 1,700 women committed suicide that year because of “dowry-related problems.”
Both figures depend on reports to the police, and experts say the true number is much higher, as with other data on domestic violence.
“Within an hour, 30-40 women are victims of domestic violence…and these are just documented[cases]so it must be much more than that,” Kavita Srivastava, an activist with the Indian People’s Union for Civilian Union Freedoms, AFP told.
Srivastava said the dowry dispute between the Meena sisters was only part of their tormentors’ efforts to take control of their lives and curtail their independence.
The root cause, she added, was a widespread social acceptance of domestic violence in India, leaving women feeling trapped in oppressive and abusive relationships.
“If even one woman has to commit suicide because her married life seems to be the end of the road,” she said, “I think the Indian state has failed for those women.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)