Opinion | Degrees, SUVs, Gold: Why India's Most 'Qualified' Men Often Demand The Steepest Dowries

A high-end SUV. A Royal Enfield motorcycle. Nearly 500 grams of gold. Cash. None of it was enough. The list of "gifts" handed over to the family of Nikki Bhati's husband after her marriage read less like a customary exchange and more like a negotiated transaction. Yet, after all that, her husband's family allegedly wanted another Rs 36 lakh. When they didn't get it, their persistent demands turned to torture, detailed in videos and her sister's accounts. Ultimately, she died in front of her young child, allegedly set on fire.

Vipin Bhati, who described himself as an advocate on his Instagram page but was unemployed, showed no remorse. The country remained hooked to updates on the case, seethed with anger, and finally saw Vipin go to jail. That is how the story of a woman, who was married in a traditional arranged set-up into an abusive family but ran a beauty salon and made content to have a sliver of independence, saw the light, and then faded out.

A year has gone by, and four alleged dowry deaths within a week have again brought a prehistoric practice, criminalised 65 years ago, to our attention. Greater Noida's Deepika Nagar allegedly fell from her matrimonial home's terrace, 17 months after her marriage. In Bhopal, Noida's Twisha Sharma was found dead in her husband's home, and Palak Rajak died an hour after she made a distress call to her father. In Karnataka's Ballari district, Aishwarya allegedly died by suicide.

These are not isolated tragedies. They are part of a national emergency disguised as "family matters". The numbers alone should have shattered any complacency long ago. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, India recorded 5,737 dowry deaths in 2024, averaging to about 16 deaths a day. The same report also pegged "cruelty by husband or his relatives" as the single largest category of crimes against women across the country. 

What's common between Nikki, Twisha, and Deepika is that their husbands were in the legal profession and they resided in - or at least belonged to - metropolitan cities. This should shatter any misconceptions that urban India is beyond such societal evils. In fact, the NCRB data for 2024 stated that among metro cities, Delhi was at the top in this infamous list, recording 109 such deaths.

Education, ironically, is more of an enabler of the practice than a hindrance, per a 2023 study quoted by the BBC. Higher dowries are demanded by "higher quality grooms", who are better-educated or have high-quality jobs. "Strong economic factors perpetuate dowry. On the bride's side, families who refuse to pay dowry for their daughters are left with 'lower quality' grooms. Grooms have a strong economic incentive to accept dowry, particularly if their family has to pay dowry for its own female children or wants to recoup investments in the groom's education," BBC quoted the study as saying.

That normalisation is what makes the violence so dangerous.

Another would be that most of the aforementioned women or their families never reported the harassment to the police. Nikki took the panchayat route. Before the panchayat, Vipin would apologise and vow to never hit her again, but would soon revert to his abusive habits. What is more enraging is the panchayat's direction to Nikki to stop making social media content, as if reinforcing the Bhati family's ask, ultimately robbing the woman of her fair shot at financial independence, and more importantly, of her autonomy.

Deepika was taken home by her parents, but later returned after assurances that the torture would stop. And Twisha's chats with her mother showed her clearly communicating feeling unhappy and lonely, adding, "Mujhe bhaut zaada ghutan ho rahi hai, maa (I feel terribly suffocated, Mother)." But the police were informed only after their bodies were found.

Nikki's sister, Kanchan, who had married Vipin's brother, recounted how her sister faced immense social pressure to make the marriage work, also for the sake of her son. But the need to "adjust" and "compromise" in a marriage are conversations that have been overheard commonly in drawing rooms, television serials, and films, until suffering begins to look virtuous and escape begins to look selfish. In this bid to promote "adjustment" to ensure marital harmony, families ignore the possibility that the victim might be at risk of suffering severe, and often fatal harm. Pair this ignorance with the stigma associated with a married woman returning to her parents' home or seeking a divorce. Add to it the patriarchy that makes families look the other way as women suffer, often with women of the husband's family becoming key perpetrators of the torture, and you have the perfect, time-tested formula that still keeps Indian women trapped in abusive marriages.

A woman might brave all these factors and find the courage to report the abuse to the police, but might be met by a system that is meant to break her. Per IndiaSpend, the number of women who die due to dowry harassment is underestimated, as many such deaths are reported as accidental ones. The "difficulty in accurately identifying and naming suspicious deaths caused by burning, drowning, or poisoning as dowry deaths" also plays a part in the persistence of the problem, a 2014 paper in the journal Trauma, Violence and Abuse noted. Even if the crime is legally recognised, authorities often consider the violence as a private family matter.

As all seems to fail in the face of dowry harassment and related deaths - education, standard of living, the victim's own families, and the very laws and system put in place to protect them - what can be done? Take collective social responsibility. Don't look away when you see harassment or when help is sought. Don't support pleas to women to "make it work" - she might already have done that, and is within her right to give up. Cultivate courage among women so that they report their suffering, and facilitate a restructuring of the mindset that aids them. And institutions, especially police and legal systems, must develop the sensitivity and urgency these cases demand.

(The author is a journalist at NDTV)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author