Acquittal angers women

Press, 24 November 1983, Page 23

Acquittal angers women

NZPA New Delhi Women’s organisations have expressed shock and anger over the acquittal by the New Delhi High Court of a man who allegedly burned his bride to death after she failed to meet his family’s dowry demands. Lakshman Kumar, his mother, Shakuntala Devi, and his brother, Subhash Chandere, were convicted on May 27 and sentenced to death by a lower court for pouring kerosene on Kumar’s wife, Sudha, and burning her to death.

It was the first death sentence pronounced in the Indian capital in numerous reported cases involving young brides burned to death in kitchen fires after they failed to meet the dowry demands of greedy in-laws.

The appellate judgment was “a retrogressive step” in India’s attempts to “eradicate social evils,” said a

statement by the Saheli, a private New Delhi social organisation for women.

Some women volunteers demonstrated in front of the High Court, vowing to step up their fight against “the evil of dowry.”

The court on November 4 overruled the murder convictions of the three accused, saying the evidence against them was inconclusive.

A spokeswoman for the Saheli organisation said the High Court “condoned this heinous crime” by acquitting the trio, and urged that bride-burning cases be treated as “extraordinary” because at least two such cases were reported every day in New Delhi.

“We condemn the attitude of the judges which appears to justify the demands made on the girl’s parents as an accepted custom,” said the spokeswoman, who declined to be identified.

Two other women’s welfare organisations also expressed anger over the High Court ruling. “The verdict only proved how far removed legal processes in India are from social reality,” said the Janwadi Mahila Samiti, a private women’s organisation.

It demanded that state officials appeal against the judgment in the Supreme Court and that representatives of women’s organisations be included as part of the prosecution.

Another women’s organisation, the Kalyani, asked the courts not to view crimes involving dowry demands from the standard of ordinary crimes, nor to apply the ordinary yardstick to prove the guilt of an accused.

These reactions were a sharp contrast with those last May, when a New Delhi

Sessions Court judge, Mr S. M. Aggarwal, was widely praised for sentencing to death the mother-in-law and her sons.

In his ruling, Mr Aggarwal said the three coaccused burned Sudha, aged 21, who was nearly nine months pregnant, in December, 1980, out of “insatiable greed.”

Her parents had resisted demands for > more money and other dowry items beyond the 512,882 already spent on her marriage. The Judge described the affair as “a well planned, barbaric, brutal, and con-science-revolting murder of a woman.”

Two High Court judges said in their verdict that they found it “impossible to agree” from the evidence that the accused had decided to kill the young bride after failing to extort more dowry from her family.