The dowry curse: How greed and patriarchy claim lives

As a civilised society, we must confront the mindset of greed, silence, and complicity, or dowry deaths will keep making headlines

- ADITYA MUKHERJEE

Recently, a 26-year-old woman in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, was burnt alive over dowry—her five-year-old son stood helplessly as a witness to the crime. In Jodhpur, a schoolteacher, driven to despair by relentless dowry harassment from her in-laws, set herself and her daughter ablaze. In Bengaluru, a 27-year-old techie was found hanging at her home. Her parents have filed a police complaint, alleging that she died by suicide because she was constantly harassed for dowry. These are not isolated tragedies. They are merely the visible tip of an iceberg of cruelty, silence, and systemic failure.

We like to believe India has entered the 21st century with confidence. We talk about space missions, digital start-ups, and global recognition. But beneath this veneer of modernity lurks a mediaeval cruelty—dowry. Tragically, India's march of progress has done little to dispel the shadows lurking in our social fabric.

Numerous such cases of dowry-related violence against married women go unreported and receive little media coverage. Greed, after all, knows no bounds. Once a family yields to the pathology of dowry, its hunger only deepens—cars, flats, foreign trips, gold, gadgets... the demands stretch endlessly. Dowry harassment has become a perverse sport for husbands and in-laws. What should have long been buried as a relic of social evil has instead morphed into a grotesque ritual of restorative perversion.