Dowry killings: Nothing can be more cruel

There is nothing as dastardly as killing a woman for dowry but it keeps happening with a chilling regularity in our country with the latest incident emerging from NOIDA in the outskirts of Delhi. A young woman was set ablaze over a dowry demand with the husband nabbed while fleeing custody.

Disturbing videos have surfaced showing the husband and another woman assaulting the wife and dragging her by the hair while another clip shows the young woman, severely burnt, walking down a staircase before collapsing. She succumbed to burns last Thursday.

Gifts and payments in cash or kind, are an inevitable part of most Indian marriages and sometimes, when they do not meet the expectations of the recipients which are the bride groom’s family, married life becomes a daily torture. While some woman suffer in silence living through the taunts and abuse - both physical and mental - a few walk away while others may suffer the extreme consequences as happened in the NOIDA case.

Reports say that dowry was the main motive behind over 6,100 murders across India in the 2017-2022 period. In the last few months, a string of dowry-related deaths have been reported. In Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, a woman died after a hot iron was pressed against parts of her body.

Another woman from Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit was burned alive allegedly after she and her family did not meet the repeated demands of her husband and his family for dowry, say reports. In Chandigarh, a young bride died by suicide allegedly due to dowry harassment.

In Tamil Nadu, near Ponneri, a woman died by suicide just four days after her wedding, allegedly due to harassment from her in-laws for dowry. Luckily in Karnataka, reports say dowry deaths have been on the decline since 2023. They have gone down from 158 deaths in 2023 to 112 in 2024 and to 48 deaths in the first five months of 2025.

Cops claim the decline in Karnataka could be because of an increase in awareness and fear among people due to stricter law enforcement. That however does not happen in the rest of India with dowry cases handicapped by long investigations and rare convictions.

The NOIDA victim’s sister, married into the same family, claims she and her deceased sister Nikki were beaten and tortured for days, adding that Nikki was set on fire in front of her child. Could there be anything more inhuman that this incident, which goes to show how the abhorrent practice is deeply embedded in India’s social and marital traditions and just cannot be wished away.

There are laws of course; dowry is prohibited and penalized under the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, which criminalizes the giving, taking, or abetting of dowry. The Act imposes punishments for demanding dowry, including imprisonment and fines, with more severe penalties for taking or giving dowry.

And yet this cruel practice continues unhindered, just like the Devadasi system in Karnataka and child marriages. It points to the need for more stringent clauses in the law to punish those who drive young women to the brink of suicide or take it upon themselves to commit murder, all for the sake of money and valuables.

The perpetrators of such crimes obviously deserve no mercy from the law or society.