why are there constiunal and legel wants for weatear section of society and woman in india???
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Gender inequality is particularly salient in South Asia. Women generally have limited power in household decision making and are often discriminated against in nutrition and education (Sen 1992; Pande 2003). As in many other countries, in India women also fall victim to violent crime at high rates.1 In this paper, we examine how rainfall variability affects dowry deaths in India.2 We also examine whether political representation of women reduces these crimes.
2.1. Social, Economic, and Legal Context
In India, violence related to dowry surfaces after marriage, when the initial dowry, paid at the time of the wedding, is already in the hands of the husband and his family. The husband and his family demand additional payments, and the husband systematically abuses the wife in order to extract larger transfers. Social stigma associated with divorce prevents women from exiting the marriage even when they are abused.6 Some have argued that parents may prefer violence against their daughters over the dishonor that divorce brings (Musa 2012). Bloch and Rao (2002) develop a framework in which marital violence is used to extract dowry transfers from the wife’s family. Their empirical findings provide strong evidence that domestic violence in India is an economically motivated crime.7
In extreme cases, these dowry disputes escalate to murders. When a wife dies, her husband becomes free to remarry and receive dowry from a new wife’s family (Mullatti 1995; Johnson and Johnson 2001). As Jutla and Heimbach (2004) describe the situation, “the husband and/or in-laws have determined that the dowry, a gift given from the daughter’s parents to the husband, was inadequate and therefore attempt to murder the new bride to make the husband available to remarry or to punish the bride and her family.” Men alleged or suspected of murdering their wives potentially find it difficult to remarry. However, in rural South Asia, men tend to marry women from faraway villages and limited local information may flow across areas. Because families are often complicit in the murder, a man can use his kinship network to distort facts about the abuse of his wife, or even conceal the existence of the previous marriage (Musa 2012; Umar 1998; Garg 1990).8 Musa (2012) argues that limited information is an important factor. “Currently, the Indian government does not publish a list of men whose wives suffered dowry-related death. However, such a list may be one of the most effective deterrence tools available to the government. As family honor is of great importance to Indian families, the threat of a tainted family honor serves as a great disincentive.” Although some families currently marry their daughters to men suspected of dowry death, if the men’s names were on the list, associating with such men might become less socially favorable.
Remarriage can be compatible with a husband’s incentives. Not only will it bring a large one-time dowry payment when the husband is facing economic hardship, it will also replace the periodic payments that were being received from the deceased wife’s natal family. The remarriage can be immediate if the husband is not arrested. It is possible that these escalations are unplanned outbursts due to psychological stress, perhaps induced by economic hardship, and are not for economic gain per se, as is the case with domestic violence in Card and Dahl (2011). However, a very extensive sociological and anthropological literature suggests that bride burning, which is the most common form of dowry death, requires meticulous planning (Oldenburg, 2002).
According to a 1986 law, the legal definition of a dowry death is the death of a woman, within seven years of her marriage, caused by any burns or other bodily injury that do not occur under normal circumstances.9 For a woman’s death to be ruled a dowry death, it must also be shown that soon before her death she was subjected to cruelty or harassment by her husband or any relative of her husband for, or in connection with, any demand for dowry. The party found guilty can receive a sentence of seven years to life. Typically, court cases last several years, and in recent years, the conviction rate is roughly one third. Domestic violence is punishable by a sentence of at most three years or a fine. Although domestic violence and dowry deaths may be complementary and happen together, dowry deaths are a separate crime category.