Simla was wed on Nov. 11, 1985, and died by fire three months later.
It is unclear how the sari of the 20-year-old housewife came to be drenched with kerosene, or how the kerosene was ignited.
According to the sketchy police report, she died of ”90 percent burns”
at Irwia hospital at 4:45 p.m. on Feb. 28, less than two hours after a neighbor saw her run, blazing, from her comfortable middle-class home in a suburb of Delhi. It was the neighbor, not family members (Simla`s husband and her mother-in-law were both home) who summoned help.
When police arrived, they asked the husband, Ajit, a few perfunctory questions. He told them his wife had accidentally spilled kerosene on herself. Kerosene is a common cooking fuel in India. The explanation apparently satisfied the police. There was no further investigation. Simla`s death was called a kitchen accident.
The young woman`s father believes otherwise.
”They say she caught fire while lighting the stove. Yet the worst burns were on her back and on the back of her head,” said the father, a surgeon, who spoke on the condition that the family name not be used. ”There was no accident. There was murder. My daughter was killed because I could not satisfy the demands of the husband`s family for more and more money.”
Chandermani Chopra, a prominent Delhi lawyer, agrees. ”All evidence suggests this poor girl was killed because her family refused to pay more dowry,” she said. ”The police looked away. Perhaps they were lazy; more likely, they were bribed.”
She added: ”This is not an unusual incident. It is an everyday tragedy here.”
Indeed, bride burnings, or dowry killings, occur with appalling frequency in contemporary India. Most are written off by police as accidents or suicides.
While there are no comprehensive statistics on such slayings, social-welfare and women`s groups say that every year about 600 women are
intentionally burned to death in the Delhi area alone. Nationwide, the annual toll is in the thousands, they say.
”Violence against women is nothing new, but the bride killings we see now are different,” said Subhadra Butalia, founder of Karmika, a Delhi-based women`s advocacy group. ”These are crimes of frustrated greed–not jealousy, passion or the other usual causes of `ordinary` domestic violence.”
Butalia, a middle-aged grandmother, became an anti-dowry activist in 1979 after witnessing the death of a young woman next door. ”I heard the shrieks, then I saw the flames,” she said. ”That girl`s cries will ring in my ears as long as I live.”
Burning is the preferred murder method because it can easily be explained away as a kitchen accident. Because dowry killings take place away from witnesses, within the privacy of the home, they are difficult to investigate. Also, Indian police are poorly paid and notoriously susceptible to bribery.
According to Chopra, bride burnings reflect the increasing materialism of Indian society and the often desperate desire of upwardly striving families to acquire possessions that mark them as members of the middle class. Young men see marriage as a way of acquiring possessions that will lend them status.
”Dowry is an old tradition, but dowry killings have little to do with Indian tradition,” Chopra said. ”They are the product of the consumerism and selfishness that are undermining the true values and traditions of Indian society.”
Most dowry killings are the grim conclusion of interfamily extortion attempts. The crimes follow a typical pattern: After the marriage, the husband will demand that the wife pressure her family for money or valuable gifts.
”So often, the family will meet the demands out of love for the daughter or out of fear that harm will come to her if they don`t,” Chopra said.
The ancient custom of dowry in India is inextricably entwined with arranged marriage (the vast majority of Indian marriages are still arranged by the parents) and with age-old attitudes toward women.
Because land, houses and other property typically pass from father to son, families by tradition make a gift of jewels and clothing, in lieu of inheritance, to the daughter and to her new family when she marries.
The practice also stems from the notion, still prevalent in India, that a daughter is an economic liability and that when she marries, the ”burden” of supporting her is passed on to the husband and his kin. Dowry, then, is a sort of compensation paid by the bride`s father to her husband and in-laws, who will shelter and feed her for the rest of her life.
Whatever its origins, critics say the custom has become perverted in modern times.
”Dowry was once the gift a bride brought to the marriage. Now it is the price of the groom. The custom has taken on an evil sheen,” said Prabeen Grewal of the Saheli Women`s Resource Center, which offers counseling services for battered wives. ”Today, dowries are negotiated like business deals. It is common for a girl`s family to go deep into debt to secure her a good husband.”
Badi, 24, a housewife, is one of the battered women who has sought help from the organization. She said her husband, an accountant, recently choked her until she fell unconscious after she criticized his demand that her parents give him money to buy a motor scooter.
”I told him my father had already provided well for us, and he flew into a rage,” she said. ”He has struck me before. Now he says he may kill me. I am afraid at home.”
Nonetheless, said Badi, who is a university graduate from an affluent Delhi family, she is reluctant to seek a divorce.
”It would blot the name of my family,” she said. ”My sisters would not be able to find husbands because people would say I had made a poor wife.”
Sociologists say dowry crimes are linked to profound social changes that have come to India since independence, especially the dramatic expansion of the middle class and the accompanying emphasis on consumer goods.
Renuka Singh, a sociologist at Delhi University, wrote recently: ”The value pattern is definitely shifting from `being` to `having,` from a society in which your identity was bound up with performing your duties according to your caste to one where the more you own the more important you are.”
Dowry payments were outlawed in 1961, but the practice remains widespread in every caste and social strata. Dowry-related killings, however, are prevalent largely among the new middle class. Among the poor, where dowries are perforce modest and largely symbolic, the crime is rare.
”It is the desire to `keep up with the Joneses` that causes these tragedies,” Butalia said. ”We`ve gone from ritual gifts to demands for Frigidaires, Seiko watches and color TVs. These are the status symbols of the new India.
”A man`s family sees dowry as the way they can increase their status by acquiring more wealth and possessions,” she said. ”And the girl`s family feels under enormous pressure to give generously.”
In many respect`s, Simla`s story is typical of the dowry disputes that end in death.
She and her husband-to-be, Ajit, met each other only twice before the marriage, which had been arranged by the families.
”The boy was well educated, from a good family and ambitious,” the bride`s father said. ”Their horoscopes were favorable. I felt it was a good match.”
As dowry, Ajit`s family requested–and received–72,000 rupees (about $6,000) in cash; jewelry worth several thousand dollars; a $1,200 stereo system; three Persian carpets; household appliances ranging from an air-conditioner to sink fixtures; video recorder and color television set; silk saris for Ajit`s mother and three sisters; and a gold watch for his brother.
Simla`s father had an inkling of trouble when, two days after the wedding, Ajit called to complain that the television set was of Indian manufacture, not Japanese.
”He felt we had cheated him,” the father said. ”He started to make demands.”
For starters, Ajit said he wanted Simla`s family to buy him an automobile. ”I told him this was impossible; I could not afford it,” the father said. ”Then he asked for money. We gave him some, but not as much as he demanded.”
Ajit, an engineer employed by the government, nursed an ambition to make movies. Ten weeks after the wedding, he told Simla`s father that he needed $8,000 to underwrite the cost of producing a screenplay he`d written. The father refused.
The next day, Simla arrived at her parents` home in tears. She told them she was desperately unhappy, that Ajit had struck her, that she would never return to him. Soon, however, Ajit appeared at the door, angrily berated the parents and ordered Simla to accompany him home.
A dutiful Indian wife, she did.
A few days later, she was dead.
