On 12 May 2026, Twisha Sharma, 33, was found hanging in her matrimonial home in Bhopal’s Katara Hills. The FIR named her husband and mother-in-law on allegations of dowry harassment. Within days the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of “alleged institutional bias and procedural discrepancies” in the handling of her unnatural death, AIIMS Delhi conducted a second autopsy, and the case was transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Six days later in Greater Noida, 25-year-old Deepika Nagar died after allegedly falling from the terrace of her three-storey matrimonial home, seventeen months into her marriage. Her father told police she had telephoned him minutes earlier saying she was being assaulted over dowry demands; the post-mortem found a brain bleed and multiple contusions. Police registered the case under Section 80(2) and Section 85 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Sections 3 and 4 of the Dowry Prohibition Act. The alleged demand was a Toyota Fortuner and around Rs 50 lakh in cash.

Both cases remain under investigation. That caveat matters. A republic governed by law must not convict through grief, television, or public fury. Yet it is also true that these names entered a queue already too long for innocence to be the only national posture. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita defines dowry death as the unnatural death of a woman within seven years of marriage where cruelty or harassment connected with a dowry demand is shown to have occurred soon before her death; the punishment is a minimum of seven years and may extend to life imprisonment.

If the statute is precise, the social disease it addresses is older, more elusive, and far more difficult to prosecute. India’s tragedy is not that it lacks laws. It is that the law arrives after the daughter has already been culturally priced. The old phrase for this pricing is paraya dhan: another’s wealth. It sounds gentle when spoken in a courtyard, almost affectionate, as though a daughter is a guest whose departure must be prepared with tears and jewellery. In truth, it is one of the most efficient phrases patriarchy has invented. It converts a child into a transfer asset.

It tells parents that investment in her education, autonomy, and inheritance is generosity rather than duty. It tells the groom’s family that acceptance carries a price. It tells the daughter that her belonging is provisional from birth. This idea did not descend from nowhere. Manusmriti 9.3, in Ganganath Jha’s canonical translation, declares that the father guards her during virginity, the husband guards her in youth, the sons guard her in old age. The woman is never fit for independence.

It would be lazy to pretend that one verse explains a civilisation. India’s own........

© The Statesman