A 29-year-old woman from Ghaziabad, UP, who taught at a Delhi school, recently committed suicide following dowry harassment by her husband and in-laws. In her suicide note, she said that her husband, a doctor by profession, “married my job, not me”. She also didn’t want her four-year-old son to become like his father. A young life lost to suicide.

The young woman teacher’s suicide will end up being just another statistic in the long list of dowry-related deaths in our country. Even after being outlawed for 64 years (since 1961), the insidious grip of dowry harassment continues to haunt our society.

The school teacher could have sought a divorce and, with her independent spirit, built a life for herself and her son. Perhaps the societal pressure on women to endure even crumbling marriages, despite no fault of their own, solely for the sake of their children weighs too heavily, leaving them feeling trapped.

Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Any young man who makes dowry a condition to marriage discredits his education and his country and dishonours womanhood.” According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 35,493 brides were killed in India between 2017 and 2022, an average of 20 women a day, for bringing........

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