ABSTRACT
India is a country full of paradoxes. A woman served as prime minister for 16 years when
Indira Gandhi twice held the top government post2; however, the latest available data from the National Crime Records Bureau in India showed that 6,208 Indian women were killed in 2003 for not bringing adequate dowry, or gifts from in-laws, to their husband’s homes. These tragic cases, called “dowry deaths” and/or “bride-burning” in India, involve women whose husbands or in-laws “engineer an accident” by bursting a kitchen stove or setting the woman on fire after dousing her with kerosene because they feel the marriage dowry was not adequate (UNICEF, 2000).
