Mind the Gap: The death and life of Nikki Bhati
Nikki Bhati's death points to the depressing reality of modern India where dowry has deep roots, violence against women is normalized.
The big story
In a country where 17 women are killed every day because of dowry, this one might have been completely unremarkable except for the fact that it happened, allegedly, in the presence of her six-year-old son. In the face of mounting outrage, it was hard to tell what generated the greater public anger: The violence with which she died or her child’s exposure to it.
The death of 28-year-old Nikki Bhati on August 21 was the culmination of a series of events that began soon after her marriage. Her father had married Nikki and her sister, Kanchan into the same family, assuming that would give them an extra patina of protection.
He was wrong. Neither the marriage nor their dowry guaranteed their safety. There was a grand wedding, expenses for which were borne by the sisters’ family. The demand and supply of gifts never ended. In one of the videos, Nikki is driving a Mercedes car. It belonged to her father. Her husbands’ family wanted one too.
In a transactional barter one must ask: What did Nikki and her sister, Kanchan get out of this wedding? By all accounts, they seem like spirited women who posted reels on social media and dreamt of running their own beauty salon.
Nikki’s husband Vipin, we are told, was unemployed and, if her brother is to be believed, a womanizer. He was also unhappy with the sisters’ social media presence and their business ambitions You can sense the clash of individual aspiration with hidebound tradition.
On February 11, after a fight, Nikki and Kanchan had returned home with their kids, Nikki’s son and Kanchan’s daughter and son. In mid-April, according to reports, the in-laws and the womens’ family reached an agreement in the presence of a caste panchayat of community elders. The sisters said they would stop posting on social media. The in-laws said Vipin would now stop ‘misbehaving’.
You know the rest of the story. The sisters went back. The violence resumed. And, now, Nikki is dead.
Grim statistics
Dowry, the taking and giving of it, has been illegal since 1961. In 1984 and 1986, the dowry law was made tougher, bringing in the much-maligned section 498A that judges say is misused.
There is not a lot of data for the number of dowry deaths in the eighties. Citing scholar Peter Mayer, advocate Sanjoy Ghose writing for Article-14 puts the number of women killed for dowry at around 3,000 in 1989. In 2022, the National Crimes Record Bureau recorded 6,516 women killed for dowry.
This number, analyses Rohan Kishore for Hindustan Times, is over 25 times the number of women killed after a rape or gang-rape.
To give you a sense of the priority with which the courts treat dowry deaths; there were 60,577 cases pending at the end of 2022. Of the 3,689 cases in which trial was completed, only 33% led to convictions, finds Kishore.
Often dowry comes masked as voluntary ‘gifts’ with the rationale that after all, a car, a flat, cash and gold also benefit the daughter. Others argue that this is in lieu of a daughter’s inheritance in paternal property, forgetting conveniently that daughters have had the same right to inherit as their brothers under Hindu law amended in 2005.
The age of social media and the eternal quest for instagrammable moments has made the big fat Indian wedding only bigger and fatter. Pictures splashed on social media have a way of creating a trickle effect. Everyone wants a designer wedding with at least a DJ. It’s no coincidence that the Bhati sisters aspired to become make-up artists.
Unhappily ever after
What is so sacrosanct about the institution we call marriage that you would rather your daughters put up with violence than let them come home?
In 2024, the government of India explained its opposition to criminalizing marital rape on the grounds that to do so would “destroy the institution of marriage”.
The argument is not that different from the one put forward by Bhikari Singh, Nikki’s father: “We wanted our daughter’s marriage to work, so we accepted the assurances.” So presumably did the panchayat that interceded to work out a deal. The caste panchayat, which has no standing in law, cannot escape moral culpability for Nikki’s death, and nor can her father who sent her back.
What happens now to Kanchan and her kids, married in that same family? Will Kanchan be left there to her fate—given that she reportedly took her sister’s dying video—and is likely a key witness? What about the children, including that six-year-old boy who gave that heart-breaking testimony of how his mamma was set ablaze by his dad?
Maybe we also need to cast a wider eye at how we have normalized gender-based violence. Unless there is complete brutalization, we don’t react. We don’t consider emotional and financial deprivation to be violence. What about the burden of upholding family honour by a woman who has been completely dis-empowered, controlled by her father, husband, and his parents? Isn’t that also violence?
And what can you say to parents who know that giving dowry is just the first step to a life of virtual slavery, but give it anyway because it is ‘tradition’, because everybody does it, because if you don’t then who will marry your daughter?
Nikki’s family did not even approach the police until the morning of August 22, after her last rites. According to reports, the in-laws begged for their right to cremate their daughter-in-law whose life had been snuffed out in their house. Shamefully, her father agreed. After all, a woman’s corpse must always leave from her marital home. That too is tradition.
