According to the recently released data by the government's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 22,372 housewives took their own lives last year - that's an average of 61 suicides every day or one suicide every 25 minutes, writers Biswajeet Banerjee

May 24, 2022, Bacchor, Baghpat,

Uttar Pradesh:

A mother and her two daughters consumed poison when police raided their house. The police were looking for her son, who had eloped with a neighborhood girl. For the last one week, the police along with the girl’s brothers frequently visited the woman’s house, sometimes at odd hours. The last time when the girl’s brothers had come, they threatened to rape the girls if they do not reveal the location of the boy. That day, May 24, the police raided the house again when there was no male member present. The woman did not open the door. But the police along with the girl’s brothers managed to enter through the backyards. When the woman saw the police with the brothers of the girl, she along with her daughters aged 18 and 16 drank poison and committed suicide.

May 25, 2022, Dudi, Jaipur, Rajasthan

Three sisters, two of them pregnant, walked with a 4-year-old toddler and a 24-day infant for four-kilometer in the scorching heat. These three sisters, aged 27, 23, and 20 years respectively, were married to three brothers, who were well off. The sisters were frequently beaten up. The eldest of these three sisters, who was a post-graduate in Mathematics, tried three to four times to return to her father’s house. As the father was poor, he cajoled her to go back to her in-laws. She returned with the hope that the situation will improve. One fine morning in mid-May, she was again beaten up by her husband. She was admitted to a hospital in Jaipur for eight days. When she recuperated, the three sisters decided to end their lives to escape from the routine bashing by their husbands. “We do not want to die … we want to live. But cannot live in this situation,” the youngest of the sisters wrote in her WhatsApp status. The three sisters, along with two kids jumped into the well and committed suicide.

The two incidents, which took place a day apart in two different states ruled by two different political parties, highlight the dominance of a patriarchal society where women are beaten up at the drop of the hat and are made to live a life no better than animals. “Women suffer in silence. In Indian society, the women take the bashing by husbands or other male members of the family as their bhagya (fate). When the torture crosses the limit, these women decide to end their lives,” Nomita P Kumar, an Associate Professor of Giri Institute of Development Studies (GIDS), Lucknow said.

A recent government survey claims that women were frequently forced to commit suicide as they had faced spousal violence. There is no secret that the daily drudgery can make marriages oppressive and matrimonial homes suffocating. This exactly had happened in the case of the three sisters of Rajasthan. They were subjected to physical abuse on one pretext or the other. In 2018, the eldest of these three sisters registered a case of dowry harassment and domestic violence against her husband and in-laws at the local police station. She withdrew the case after a compromise between her in-laws and her father.

These three sisters were married to three brothers in 2015. The sisters were educated—the eldest a post-graduate in mathematics, the second one a Graduate, and the youngest one and the youngest doing her B.Ed. In contrast, their husbands were illiterate. “As the girls were more educated than their husbands this could be a possible reason for friction between them as there are reports that these women were forced to cook in firewood oven despite the household having an LPG connection. The other friction point could be that father of these girls was poor and they did not bring enough dowry,” Kumar said and added: “Women are really resilient, but there's a limit to tolerance”.

According to the recently released data by the government's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 22,372 housewives took their own lives last year - that's an average of 61 suicides every day or one suicide every 25 minutes. Housewives accounted for 14.6 percent of the total 153,052 recorded suicides in India in 2020 and women account for more than 50 percent of the total number of suicides.

The rate of suicide in India is so high that women in India accounted for 36 percent of global female suicide deaths in 2016, a study in The Lancet Public Health said. It further said that women between the age group of 15 and 29 years account for the maximum number of suicides in India. The authors of this study speculate that these suicides may be related to a conflict between women’s increasing education and empowerment and the persistence of their lower status in Indian society.

 But sometimes, it is the societal fear and stigma that forces women to end their lives. In the Baghpat case, humiliated by a police raid after weeks of alleged harassment, the mother, 45, and their two daughters, aged 18 and 16, killed themselves by consuming poison. She belonged to the OBC caste. The girl who eloped with her son Prince belonged to the Dalit community.

On May 2, the boy, 22, and the girl 19 eloped. The FIR was lodged on May 4. This started days and weeks of harassment. The father was first taken to a police station and was detained for two days where he was beaten up. They asked only one question - where were his son and the girl. A few days later, police started raiding their house. The police used to come with the brothers of the girl. The brothers even threatened to take two daughters of the women with them and rape them.

“We were scared because the brothers of the girls had repeatedly said that they would take my daughter and keep them at their house till the eloped couple returns. They even threatened to rape them. My wife was so scared that she stopped going out. Even she stopped the daughters to move out of the house because some boys of their own caste passed comments about their brother being eloped with a Dalit girl,” the father of the daughter, who is a menial labourer, said.

He said that his wife was in such a trauma that she used to say who will marry their daughters now. My daughters were also scared of the way the police and brothers of the girl behaved with them. They used to say it is better to die than to live with this kalank (blot). Fearing the social stigma my wife committed suicide with two daughters.

“There is a gender bias. The woman will be subjected to ill-treatment if her brother elopes with a girl while the brother of the girl will be spared of the barbs. Why is this? This shows the patriarchal mindset where there are two sets of rules for boys and girls. This biased approach leads a woman to commit suicide as she is vulnerable in this male-dominated society,” Lenin Raghuvanshi of People's Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) said.

Gender bias is an inherent characteristic of a patriarchal society - it is a form that demeans women in a variety of ways. “Patriarchy is a system of social structure and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women. The male-dominant Indian society makes its women habitual of this discrimination. As a result, most women fail to understand their own rights and freedom”, Raghuvanshi said

“Unfortunate part is Indian women have accepted their subordinate position to men and are also part and parcel of the same patriarchal system,” he said.

This is evident in the Rajasthan incident. The mother-in-law of the three women remained a mute spectator as her sons tortured their wives. “Sab bhagya hai (it is all destined)”, she uttered as police arrested her three sons.

 (The writer is Political Editor, The Pioneer, Lucknow)