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JAIPUR, India: Earlier than the three sisters and their youngsters have been discovered useless in a properly, they left a message blaming the household that they had married into.
Kalu, Kamlesh and Mamta Meena have been victims of a dispute over dowries, the customarily hefty sums Indian mother and father pay to marry off their daughters.
The sisters had wed brothers from the identical family and lived below the identical roof, however suffered fixed violence from their husbands and in-laws, in response to the trio’s grieving relations.
They have been abused always, they are saying, together with when their father failed to satisfy calls for for extra money.
All three have been discovered useless final month close to their marital residence, a village on the outskirts of Jaipur, together with Kalu’s four-year-old son and toddler little one. Each Kamlesh and Mamta have been pregnant.
“We don’t want to die however demise is healthier than their abuse,” learn a message on WhatsApp left by one of many sisters after their disappearance, a cousin stated.
“Our in-laws are the rationale behind our deaths. We’re dying collectively as a result of it’s higher than dying each day.”
Authorities are investigating and at present treating the deaths as suicides, a senior police officer in Jaipur stated.
The sisters’ distraught father, Sardar Meena, stated life had been a residing hell for his daughters, whose husbands banned them from pursuing their training and always harassed them for extra funds.
“We had already given them so many issues, you’ll be able to see them of their residence,” he stated, counting off the beds, tv units and fridge he offered to the household.
“I’m the daddy of six ladies, there’s a restrict to how a lot I can provide,” added Sardar, who earns a meager revenue as a farmer.
“I had educated them and simply doing that was troublesome.”
Police have arrested the three husbands, their mom and a sister-in-law on fees of dowry harassment and spousal abuse.
Makes an attempt to contact the boys’s household have been unsuccessful.
India outlawed the observe of paying dowries greater than 60 years in the past, and harassment or extortion over the funds is a prison offense.
However the customized persists, significantly in rural areas, undergirded by social conventions that deal with ladies as an financial burden and demand compensation for accepting them as brides.
Native information shops frequently report on marital property disputes that finish in homicide.
Final 12 months, a person within the southern state of Kerala was jailed for all times after utilizing venomous snakes to homicide his spouse and take sole management of their property, which included a brand new automotive and 500,000 rupees ($6,500) offered by her household as dowry.
Courts have additionally been punitive of their therapy of dowry harassment, final month jailing a person in Kerala for 10 years after his cost calls for have been blamed for driving his spouse to suicide.
A pervasive taboo round divorce — just one in 100 Indian marriages finish in dissolution — has stored married ladies from considering escape from abusive conditions.
For the Meena sisters, leaving was by no means seen as an possibility, though their relations have been conscious of the violence.
“As soon as they have been married, we thought they need to stay of their marital houses, to take care of the dignity of the household,” Sardar stated.
“If we had gotten them remarried in one other residence, and if that scenario turned out to be worse, then what’s going to we do? We’ll lose face.”
India’s Nationwide Crime Data Bureau recorded almost 7,000 dowry-related killings in 2020 — round 19 ladies each day.
The identical company reported that greater than 1,700 ladies killed themselves that 12 months over “dowry-related points.”
Each figures are depending on studies to police, and specialists say the precise variety of circumstances is way larger, as with different knowledge on household violence.
“In an hour, some 30 to 40 ladies are victims of home violence… and these are simply documented (circumstances), so it should be rather more than that,” Kavita Srivastava, an activist with India’s Folks’s Union for Civil Liberties, stated.
Srivastava stated the dowry dispute involving the Meena sisters was only one a part of their tormentors’ efforts to regulate their lives and limit their independence.
The elemental trigger, she added, was a widespread social acceptance of home violence in India that leaves ladies feeling trapped in oppressive and violent relationships.
“If even one girl has to kill herself as a result of her marital life looks as if the top of the highway,” she stated, “I really feel the Indian state has failed for these ladies.”