kanyadana different from the system of dowry prevalent in large
part of India today
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Answer:
Dowry is one of the great hazards of the Indian social system - an evil that has grown grotesquely over the years, perpetrated by the lavish exhibitionism and greed of the upper idle class and which now diseases the entire system. Its causes are as depraved as its effects our cover story points out: dowry, or rather the lack of it, can kill. The number of alleged suicides that take the toll of young Indian brides could well be caused by in-laws disgruntled by the small dowry. Poor people in the remotest of areas, the CSWR maintains, pay as much as 10 to 18 per cent monthly interest "on loans taken to fulfil these tawdry wedding obligations." Is there any systematic approach that can be formulated to check this growing cancer? At the many levels that it abounds, what can be done to tackle it successfully?
The pretty young girl, the only child of her parents, had been married just six months when one day she was found dead - allegedly accidentally burnt by an upturned kerosene stove. Strange and significant was the fact that all 14 members of the joint family living on the premises were, it was claimed, out of the house on the day when this incident happened.
In other words, a conservative middle class household had, contrary to all conventional norms, gone off leaving the young "bahu" unchaperoned in a rambling haveli somewhere on the Punjab-Delhi border.
It seemed an unlikely story on the face of it but when further the girl's father, a sections officer in government service, drew attention to marks of beatings on the girl's body and that earlier there had been recriminations on an inadequate dowry, the need to probe deeper was only too apparent.
Yet the police gave an accidental death verdict for which the father has since approached the CBI and several leading voluntary organizations for further investigation. And so, yet another statistic piled in the "death by accidental burns" column of the national register.
The case of this ill-fated young girl is no isolated example. Scarcely a week goes by without a snippet tucked away somewhere in the newspaper about some house-wife or the other accidentally burnt to death or in the rural areas drowned in the village well.
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