Why Women need Anti Dowry Movement
The most severe in “bride burning”, the burning of women whose dowries were not considered sufficient by their husband or in-laws.Most of these incidents are reported as accidental burns in the kitchen or are disguised as suicide.
Official records of these incidents are low because they are often reported as accidents or suicides by the family. In Delhi, a woman is burned to death almost every twelve hours.The number of dowry murders is increasing.In 1988, 2,209 women were killed in dowry related incidents and in 1990, 4,835 were killed.
Government figures there were a total of 5,377 dowry deaths in 1993, an increase of 12% from 1992.Despite the existence of rigorous laws to prevent dowry-deaths under a 1986 amendment to the Indian Penal Code (IPC), convictions are rare, and judges(usually men)are often uninterested and susceptible to bribery.
To get rid of it,women need anti dowry movement.
Anti Dowry Movements in India
Begining of the anti-dowry movement was in the 1970s and 1980s.The movement appeared to lose steam in the 1990s as women’s organisations dealt with a spate of other issues,but problems related to dowry continued to multiply.The women’s movement in India is a rich and vibrant movement which has taken different forms in different parts of the country.The Dowry Prohibition (Amendment) Act (1984, 1986) makes the giving and taking of dowry “as a condition of marriage” punishable by law, while excluding “voluntary gifts” -a combination of provisions which makes for toothless sanctions.
There are various movements which done by Indian Women.Some are as following
2.AIWC: The All India Women’s Congress (AIWC) was the first all India women’s organisation.Its charter explicitly identified the organisation with the mainstream struggle for national freedom. Both bourgeois liberals and the Left joined together in the AIWC, and its formation coincided with Mahatma Gandhi’s calls in the 1920s to popularise the freedom movement, to sunder the struggle from its upper caste, elite moorings.Thus the AIWC and those associated with it not only saw their role as fighting for the status and rights of women but unambiguously located this task within the agenda of the freedom struggle as a whole. This was the real strength that the women’s movement acquired at its birth.It has remained a cherished tradition within the movement, a tradition that still lives and informs the movement through its ups and downs.
3.NARS: This movement(“Nari Atma Raksha Samity i. e. NARS”) rapidly grew and developed structured links with the organised Left. Members of NARS supported and participated in the historic Tebhaga struggle. Elsewhere in the country, women with Left political leanings were involved in working class and revolutionary peasant struggles, such as the struggle in Telengana. Telengana proved a very influential learning experience for the Left, illustrating how women could fight.
4.Anti-Arrack: Anti-arrack movement in Andhra Pradesh grew out the inspiration gained by women in adult literacy classes. In 1992, women of Dubagunta village in Nellore, one of the poor drought prone districts of Southern Andhra Pradesh, organised and agitated to force the closure of the arrack (liquor) shop in the village. Newspapers published this story, and women all over the state marched to arrack shops and sought to stop the auction of contracts to sell arrack.The press, in particular, Eenadu, the largest circulating Telugu daily, covered the anti-arrack movement that was spearheaded by the women for a year (Gopalakrishnaiah, 1997).But the prohibition imposed by the State in 1993 on arrack was withdrawn in 1994 as the it wanted additional revenue generated by liquor sales.The experience, however, gave the women’s groups in Andhra Pradesh new confidence and power to check the alcohol abuse by men in their families, and to prevent domestic violence by alcoholic husbands. Contribution of great women in anti dowry movements
1.Sarojini Naidu: The first to join was Sarojini Naidu, who went on to become the first woman President of the Indian National Congress in 1925.Her presence was a signal for hundreds of other women to join, and eventually the salt protest was made successful by the many women who not only made salt, but also sat openly in marketplaces selling, and indeed, buying it.
Sarojini Naidu’s spirit lives on in thousands of Indian women today.
2.Rojammas: A poor woman from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, attended a literacy class.It talked about a poor woman, struggling to make ends meet, who was regularly beaten by her husband. Whatever he earned, he spent on liquor, and then, drunk and violent, he attacked her because she had no food to give him.Rojamma collected her friends together, and they began to picket liquor shops. The campaign spread like wildfire. In village after village, women got together, they talked, they went on strike, they beat up liquor shop owners, they refused to allow their husbands to squander money on liquor.The sale of liquor was banned in Andhra Pradesh, reluctantly, by the government for liquor brings in huge amounts of money. As a result, savings went up, violence levels dropped, and the lives of poor women began to improve.
3.Indira Gandhi: Indira Gandhi’s government declared a State of Emergency in 1975, putting a stop to all democratic political activity. Activists, both young and old, women and men, were forced to go underground or to stop all political work. It was only when the Emergency was lifted, some 18 months later, that overground political activity resumed. It was around this time that many of the contemporary women’s groups began to get formed, with their members often being women with a history of involvement in other political movements.
The hundreds of thousands of Rojammas and Sarojini Naidus who are to be found all over India form part of one of the most dynamic and vibrant of political movements in India today, the women’s movement.