Dowry Diary

January 7, 2021 Stan

A comfortable job in USA as a computer software Engineer is one among the many dreams, which top the list of aspiring youngsters from India. The desire for dollars in multiples of thousands and the accompanying dreams would be evident from the young crowd that throngs the US embassies in India.

The first step is over. Indian software companies have increased manifold, which deputes software professionals on company visas to USA. Their value increases in the Indian marital market, leaving most of Indian parents and young Indian women to follow suit after their wedlock to the engineers. Parents find pride in seeing their daughters married to Indian software Professionals in USA and this despite many odds, which they have to bear in the form of dowry and other paraphernalia that the boy’s family demands.

Even before their daughters could fully enjoy the greener pastures of dollar dreams in USA, the road to marital bliss becomes a distant dream for many; if recent incidents or accidents, so to speak, in Indian Us families are any indication.

Smalin Jenita, a young Indian woman was allegedly pushed from a running car by the members of her husband’s family. This happened in USA, while her husband was driving the car. He lost control in the melee and finally the car met with an accident. The pathos was that while everybody fled the scene, Smalin alone was abandoned in the spot.

Although political relationships are sour between India and Pakistan, a Good Samaritan in the form of a Pakistani Doctor rescued this Indian girl and admitted her in a hospital. Smalin landed in a coma; however, the Doctor managed to find out the contacts in India and informed her parents. Until that moment, they were not aware of their daughter’s trauma abroad. Pitiably, Smalin was by then pregnant and after formalities in USA, she was brought to Chennai, the capital of Tamilnadu. Her left side paralyzed, she had the will to recover gradually in Chennai. She has also given birth to a baby girl and both of them are safe. Though she minced words due to her illness, she was clear to state that she was tortured for dowry. Her parents have booked a case in India against her husband’s family.

They are also in the process of seeking justice in the US courts. The issue became a national furor with women’s welfare organizations in India offering support for the victim of physical abuse and Dowry torture overseas. The incident drew the attention of the US Ambassador in India and the whole gamut of the problem by this time would have reached the US government. However, the legal tangle is as usual complicated and the outcome needs to be evaluated over a period.

Indian Parents are to learn many lessons in the wake of such incidents, since the lure for dollars and a posh lifestyle alone would not suffice to keep their daughters happy abroad. The Internet has allowed many fake personalities and such families to advertise themselves for matrimony, where the girls’ parents fall for the charms of their background. They fail to enquire thoroughly about the family antecedents; and by the time they wake up to the reality, it is too late.

Newlywed Indian girls should exercise caution abroad and see that their passports and other immigration documents are in their custody. They should possess a cash balance equal to their flight ticket minimum and in case of any untoward event; the safety measures will help them to fly back their way home. Another young Indian woman by name Muthumari has faced the same problem, but she has escaped unhurt from USA. Her husband holds their daughter in his custody and she is in a quandary to fight the problem now.

It is not greedy to send the daughters in marriage to US. What it needs is a little care and other precautionary measures that need to be taken, if the girls face in the alien land. Unless parents and their girls constantly keep watch in these aspects, it would be difficult to end such problems. Governmental interventions have their procedural delays; however, foreign nations, where such crimes take place should seek to expedite justice and if laws do not exist now, they have to be enacted at the earliest for the benefit of the women that arrive in their nations, with dreams and hopes.