Three young women, sisters married to siblings, were found dead, along with two children. Suspicion falls on their in-laws, against a background of violence justified by demands for dowries.
From daily violence to a family drama. On May 28, the lifeless bodies of three sisters, aged between 20 and 25, as well as two boys aged just one month and 4 years old, were discovered in a well in the village of Dudu, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Kamlesh, Mamta and Kalu Meena, the three young women, apparently committed suicide, no longer able to bear the hell they lived through daily in their in-laws – they were married to three brothers. Their bereaved father, who searched for them for several days after worrying about their disappearance, accuses the in-laws of having pushed them to the limit. The three husbands, their mother and a sister-in-law were taken into custody.
“They were regularly beaten and harassed for their dowries,” accused their cousin Hemraj Meena, quoted by NDTV. “When they disappeared on May 25, we went right to left to find them. We reported them missing to the police station and to women’s organizations, but we received very little help,” he continued. The panic in the Meena family was all the stronger as Kamlesh, the youngest of the sisters, had sent an alarmist message shortly before: “We are leaving, be happy because the reason for our death is our in-laws, it is better to die once and for all than to die a little each day. So we decided to die together. We hope to be all three together in the next life. We don’t want to die but our in-laws harass us. Don’t blame our parents for our deaths.”
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“We had already given them so much”
“Their husbands beat them every day, they killed my daughters,” said bereaved father Sardar Meena, quoted by the “Times of India”. According to him, his eldest Kalu was violently beaten by her husband last month: “When my daughters disappeared, I thought that their husbands could have killed them. They alone are responsible for their deaths.” The reason for the surge of violence, according to him: the desire of his in-laws to obtain more and more money as a dowry, a practice officially illegal for 60 years but still followed by virtue of traditions. “We had already given them so much,” he lamented. “I am the father of six girls, there is a limit to what I can give. They were educated and just that, it was difficult. Two of his daughters who committed suicide were pregnant, he said.
Dramas linked to dowry money regularly come to the news in India: in 2020, nearly 7,000 crimes and 1,700 suicides linked to this practice were recorded in the country, like this man sentenced the year the latter to life in prison for having killed his wife, by cobra bites, to take control of property that had been offered as a dowry, including a car. On May 31, three days after the bodies of the three sisters were discovered, Nusrat Imrat Qureshi, a 22-year-old young woman, was killed in the state of Maharashtra. Married last March, she was suffocated with lemons, beaten and strangled by her in-laws who were also harassing her for a dowry payment, after she accused her husband of having an affair, reports OpIndia.