With the criminal bludgeoning of the Indian girl child through female infanticide and foeticide, combined with domestic violence and dowry deaths for the married one, the Indian woman’s bag of gifts seems to be complete; well, almost. Now, the National Family and Health Survey has estimated that an unbelievably huge 33% of all juvenile Indian girls are married off by the age of 15.
But another additional facet to this information is the fact that while the media goes on a hyper-drive portraying the happening marriages of the glitterati, almost unexplored remains the issue that millions of parents in India become indebted in order to fulfill the jaw-dropping dowry demands, and to match expectations and social acceptability of their peer groups in organising marriages with ostentatious appeal. Their pomp and show is backed up by a hope that their daughter will have a prosperous marital life. Shamefully, almost all the social evils related to females in India have one or the other linkage to the financial burden incurred by the parents in getting their daughters married.
They say we Indians are culturally a ‘bonded’ community. Well, what they say must be true, what with the millions of bonded women ‘wife’ labourers that we see slogging all across India in millions of wed’locked households!