There is near-silence on domestic violence

The fact that S Kiran Kumar was beating his wife Vismaya V Nair because he was unhappy about the dowry her father had paid was no secret, not even to her family. Just nine days into her marriage, the 22-year-old told her father, “I cannot bear it anymore.”

Six months later, while visiting her parent’s home, Kumar slapped his wife in the presence of her father, mother and brother. When her brother tried to intervene, he broke his arm.

The next day, the family went to the police station. Kumar’s family intervened and the case was never filed. Nair, a final year Ayurveda student, stayed at her parent’s home for a while, then she returned to her husband.

In June 2021, she hanged herself in the bathroom.

For abetting his wife’s death by suicide, a Kerala court earlier this week sentenced Kumar to 10 years in prison. The obvious question was: Why did Nair continue to live with a husband who had been abusing her since the beginning of the marriage?

Nair’s mother told the media that her daughter worried about what people would say if the marriage didn’t work out. That answer must be tempered with three indisputable facts.

Despite rising educational attainment, marriage remains central to the lives of girls. From the moment of her birth, the goal of parents is to find their daughter a suitable match. And this cuts across class, caste, religion, socio-economic status, education, urban/rural, and north/south divides. A woman is not complete without a husband. This is a message that is accepted and internalised by daughters as well.

The stickiness of that attitude coincides with a rising prevalence of dowry in post-liberalisation, consumerist India. Even in states such as Kerala with the highest literacy levels in the country, dowry is now common in communities where once it never existed.

And then there’s the third indigestible truth: Domestic violence. What can be worse than the latest National Family Health Survey-5 data that finds that one in three married women are subjected to domestic violence? That half of the men and women interviewed believe it’s ok to beat a wife if she doesn’t perform her “duties”, including cooking, respecting his parents and taking her husband’s permission to leave the house.

We are in a crisis. For years, traditionalists have placed Indian families on a culturally superior pedestal and insisted that marriage is a sacrament despite data that tells us emphatically that the home is not the safest place for women. We have laws against both domestic violence (since 2005) and dowry (1961), and yet we are nowhere near stamping these out. From activists to politicians, there is near silence on these rampant issues. As a result, the real work of changing mindsets hasn’t even begun.

Ultimately, as a society, we are all complicit in the death of Nair. How many more must die before we begin to change our attitudes?