Opinion Nikki Bhati case: To fight dowry, we must acknowledge it first

If we go by the NCRB 2022 statistic of 6,450 dowry deaths in 2022 (or 17.67 a day) that I’ve quoted above, at least 4,205 women have been murdered for dowry so far in 2025. Of course, the real number is likely to be much higher. Yet this travesty does not carry enough heft to make it to any prime ministerial speech, even one that runs 103 minutes long. Dowry deaths are never the lead story in any mainstream newspaper. Dowry is just one in a list of social evils that hasn’t made it to the consciousness of the AI age, despite the fact that its fires are literally burning down homes.

For every Nikki Bhati, allegedly a victim of dowry killing, we miss the story of 16 others that happened that same day. Nikki’s sister says both siblings, married on the same day into the same family in 2016, faced torture and harassment from the start. I can’t help but despair at the system that forces even educated, financially independent women to believe they are less than a man, any man, even one they haven’t chosen. Marriage extracts a hefty price — if they’re lucky, a lifetime of misery.

It’s no wonder that some Indian women feel they need to go to extremes to avoid getting married. Like the Bhopal lawyer Archana Tiwari, who planned her own disappearance so she wouldn’t have to marry a man her parents had picked for her.

Sometimes, it really feels that the only way a woman can avoid dowry in this country where 90 per cent of marriages involve dowry (according to a World Bank study that examined 40,000 rural weddings between 1960 and 2008) is to simply avoid getting married.

But it’s not about rural or urban, activist Brinda Adige recently told a television reporter. “There is no geography for demanding dowry and giving dowry,” she said, adding that it is “prevalent in every religion, every caste, every class”.

There’s nothing new to say about dowry. It’s been illegal since 1961, but its high prevalence makes it likely that at least some of the descendants of those who outlawed it are complicit in the practice. Jeffrey Weaver of the University of Southern California has described it as “one of the most significant financial transactions for Indian households”, which gives you a clue as to why it is still around. Weaver — an economics professor — referred to dowry as “transfers from the household of a bride to that of her groom”.

But Weaver’s description leaves out the post-transfer reality. In recent months alone, women have been drowned, their throats slit, heads battered with bricks, burned with a hot iron, pushed to die by suicide and set on fire — all in the name of dowry. And we continue to do absolutely nothing about this crime.

Here are two ideas for the “Beti Bachao” brigade if their goal is really to make daughters self-reliant and self-confident. Every year, award a Padma Shri to one woman who publicly speaks up against the practice of dowry. Like the mathematics teacher who got so fed up with being asked for dowry that she began a petition asking the police to conduct raids at marriage venues to curb this evil practice. Or the woman who fought a case against dowry demands from an aspiring civil servant and who is now a Supreme Court lawyer. The stories of such women deserve to bask in the warmth of our hero worship. Also, consider giving national awards and tax breaks to films that centre the impact of dowry such as the Malayalam film Ponman.

Update the history books. Don’t talk of dowry like it’s an evil from our past that we successfully eradicated. To fight dowry, we must acknowledge it first.

The writer is a Bengaluru-based writer and co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram