Dowry Violence Quotes

“The discriminatory practice of coercive dowry demands and dowry violence not only persists with impunity despite legal reforms, but it is belligerently expanding in terms of magnitude, the severity of violence, and outreach.”
― Shalu Nigam

“Centuries ago, when Karl Marx wrote exhaustively about the callous exploitation of workers by the capitalist class, he may not have imagined how in South Asia, women as brides would be treated as commodities, pitilessly exploited, and violently murdered in their own homes by their abusive husbands for extorting wealth. As the ruthless oppression of the toiling masses could not be prevented by laws or policies, the merciless torture and murder of women could not be regulated despite establishing a legal mechanism in place. Over the decades, predatory capitalism has irrevocably acquired an altered form, and the free-market approach has devised a new mechanism of manipulation. Similarly, the viciousness of the neoliberal forces, clubbed with patriarchy, feudalism, conservatism, rampant materialism, and excessive consumption propelled by extensive consumerism, is aggravating the desire among men and their families to accumulate quick wealth using marriage as a tool to extract resources from women and their families. The bourgeoisie-proletariat categorization, in the situation of dowry practice, is expanded to include the classification of savagely privileged men versus women – rich or poor, and in urban or rural areas. Women from all backgrounds dreadfully suffer for the material gains of men and their families in a harsh and hostile environment fuelled by the neoliberal, Brahmanical capitalist patriarchy.”
― Shalu Nigam

“When Gary Becker, an American economist, in his celebrated `Treatise of Family’ imagined a household as a primary site of production of goods and sustenance in the form of child care, meals, and shelter, besides a range of commodities such as health, happiness, self-esteem, security, sexual pleasure, and so on, he disregarded the fact that a family is also a site of reproducing inequalities and sustaining patriarchal values. Becker proposed the theory of a rational `economic man’ who makes choices based on his self-interest, but he has not contemplated the dire situations of exploitation, blackmail, and extortion within marriages in South Asian patriarchal, hierarchical societies where self-interest would turn into insatiable greediness to create an antagonistic situation where an `economic man’, driven by irrational voracity, ends up torturing and murdering `his wife’, and destroying his own family when his arbitrary demands remain unfulfilled”
― Shalu Nigam

“When Karl Marx elaborated upon the savage exploitation of workers by the capitalists, he described that due to extensive mechanization and division of labour, the work of the proletarians lost its exclusive character and became dull and monotonous increasing the repulsiveness of work while decreasing the wages. However, in the case of dowry extortion, the women are oppressed in multiple ways. The authoritative Brahminic ideology that propagates the dowry, forcibly extorts wealth from a woman and her family, mercilessly exploits her labour, and simultaneously deprives of her any wages or any monetary compensation for her extensive contribution behind the veil of labour of love and the rhetoric of sacrifices for the sake of family.”
― Shalu Nigam

“The discourse around the practice of dowry intertwined the individual rights of women within the paradox of patrilocality, a woman’s traditional position and role with her natal and matrimonial family, and the privileged position of men within the institution of marriage. Women are being considered as the `valiant keepers of the tradition’ of marriage, how violent it is, rather than as humans or citizens endowed with political rights. The discourse also ignored the tensions between women as individuals, as citizens, and women as daughters, wives, and daughters-in-law. Upholding patriarchy and not women’s emancipation remains the goal of such socio-legal debate.”
― Shalu Nigam