Bride Burning in India

Bride burning is a practice seen in India and other Asian countries in which a women is murdered by being burned to death. The practice centers on the dowry system, which is when the bride and/or the bride's family pay the groom and/or his family a fee in order for the man and the woman to get married. This dowry system is an effort to find the man a suitable wife. The horrible practice of bride burning is still practiced mainly due to deep rooted cultural beliefs in this part of the world that give males superiority in society. Another contributing factor is the caste system which, while supposedly outlawed, is still prominent in Indian society.
Once married, the bride is still expected to provide the dowry to the groom and his family. When a bride is unable to provide the dowry the groom or his family may decide to take matters into their own hands by killing the woman. Many times they will try to disguise the murder as a suicide and burning is a common tactic used. The groom's family will often burn the bride to death in her kitchen and tell authorities that the death was due to a "kitchen accident" such as an exploding stove. The authorities do not look at these cases closely and the groom and his family are rarely held accountable for these crimes. Corruption is common in law enforcement and these cases are easily snuffed out so that the bride's family never receives justice for their relative's murder.
The saddest part of the whole situation is that women in India are willing to put up with poor treatment and the threat of death just to be married. Often times the dying bride, just being victim to a gruesome burning, still refuses to incriminate her husband or his family. Sometimes after one woman has been killed her family will attempt to marry her sister to the same man that killed their first daughter. This sad fact is a result of the caste system and Indian culture making it so that the woman's family has nowhere else to turn for a husband for their next daughter but to the man that murdered their first daughter.
Education of women in India is critical in stopping the abuse they are enduring. These women are treated like nothing more than possessions and that is not acceptable. Women's groups need to be formed in India to empower women and to force the government to recognize that there is a problem. The biggest task of all would be to eliminate the dowry system. This will be very difficult because of its close ties to Indian culture, but it is absolutely necessary because it is the source of the problem. While other cultures must be respected, women should still not be treated like objects. Women in India deserve the same freedoms that other women around the world enjoy and at the very least they deserve to not live in fear of being eliminated like a household pest. Hopefully sometime in the not so distant future women in India will not have to fear this gruesome crime.

Source:

http://www.hindunet.org/srh_home/1996_2/msg00193.html