Another Week, Another Bride, Another FIR
“Sorry, Mummy… I can’t take it anymore.” Those were among the final words of Srishti Kandhari, a government schoolteacher in Dehradun, in a video she recorded before she died by suicide, eight months into her marriage. Her family has accused her husband, Saurabh Rautury, her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law of months of mental and physical harassment. An FIR has been registered. The video is now circulating widely online. And somewhere in Dehradun this week, a mother is grieving a daughter the system was supposed to protect and did not.
If this story feels familiar, that’s because it is. It is not an aberration. It is a pattern with a new name attached to it every few days, in every part of the country, regardless of income, education, or how “modern” the marriage looked from the outside. Srishti was a government employee, economically independent, educated, and employed in a profession built around protecting the young. None of it was enough to protect her.
Read the news from the same window as Srishti’s death, and a grim rhythm emerges. It is not one case, but a chorus of nearly identical ones.
In Bengaluru, a 24-year-old woman named Spandana died by suicide after her father says she called him hours earlier, describing relentless physical and mental torture by her husband and mother-in-law over an unmet ₹5-lakh dowry demand that had already, once, been paid in full. Police have booked both the husband and his mother under provisions for cruelty and dowry death.
In Bihar, a man accused of killing his wife, Muskan, over a dowry dispute died by suicide himself before he could surrender to police, leaving her family’s case for justice unresolved along with his own, and no trial to answer the question of what actually happened to her.
In Greater Noida, a woman’s “suspicious” death, five years into her marriage, is now being investigated as a dowry death, in the very house where her own younger sister had earlier been married into the same family.
In Basti, Uttar Pradesh, a woman named Beenu Jaiswal filed a complaint alleging that after her marriage, her husband Sarvesh Kumar Jaiswal’s family, having already received ₹10 lakh in dowry, began demanding an additional ₹30,000 in cash, gold jewellery, and ₹46,000 worth of electronics, and turned to physical and mental abuse when the demands weren’t met. A case has now been registered against her husband and three in-laws.
And it wasn’t only married women. In the Goverdhan area of Uttar Pradesh, police said a 10-year-old girl was allegedly raped by her landlord, a 42-year-old man originally from West Bengal, after her mother approached police with a complaint. He has been booked. A child was allegedly harmed, in the place she is supposed to be safest, her own home, by the very man entrusted with that home.
Five cases. Five different districts. Five different families who will now spend years inside a legal system that was supposed to have protected them before any of this became necessary. The details vary: a landlord instead of a husband, a car instead of cash, a note instead of a video. But the shape of the story never does. Escalating demands or entitlement, a woman or child who says something is wrong, and a system that engages only after the worst has already happened.
Widen the window by even a few more days, and the pattern doesn’t ease. It deepens, and it starts including the very people meant to enforce the law.
In Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, police say a 4-year-old girl was raped by a neighbour who lured her out of her home with the promise of something small, the kind of temptation that works precisely because a small child has no reason yet to distrust an adult she recognises. The accused has been arrested. The case falls under the Mishrikh police station area.
Two separate cases, reported within days of each other, allege that the perpetrator wasn’t a stranger or a relative, but a police officer, the very authority a family is supposed to be able to turn to. In one, reported by NDTV, a UP constable is accused of luring a 10-year-old girl with an offer to drop her home, then raping and killing her. In another, also reported by NDTV, a constable is accused of kidnapping a minor from a hospital and strangling her to death after allegedly raping her. If even a fraction of what’s alleged in either case holds up, it says something more damning than any statistic in this piece. The uniform meant to represent protection can, in the worst cases, become the disguise.
The violence this week wasn’t confined to sexual crimes or dowry, either. In Jehanabad, Bihar, a 25-year-old woman named Anshu Devi was allegedly killed by her brother-in-law in an argument that police say began over a delay in serving food, an act of violence so disproportionate to its stated trigger that it says less about the “reason” and more about how little a woman’s life can end up weighing in the calculus of a man’s anger. In Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, a young man named Aditya allegedly shot his girlfriend three times before turning the gun on himself in what police believe was tied to their relationship. He died at the scene, and she remains hospitalised in serious condition. In Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, a 26-year-old woman named Kiran Kumari died by hanging at her parental home, where she had been staying after a dispute with her husband. Police and a forensic team have since visited the scene, from the Ziyapur police station area. And in Thane, Maharashtra, a man allegedly stabbed his own son to death after the young man tried to intervene and protect his mother during a domestic fight, a reminder that this kind of violence rarely stays contained to the person it’s aimed at.
None of these stories made national front pages for more than a cycle. Most won’t be remembered by name in a month. Together, in a single week, they describe a country where a woman or a girl can be endangered by a neighbour, a brother-in-law, a boyfriend, a husband’s family, or the police officer sent to protect her. For now, “arrested,” “booked,” and “an FIR has been registered” are the only accountability most of these families will see anytime soon.
None of this is anecdotal, and none of it is rare enough to be dismissed as a bad week.
Government data shows that between 2017 and 2022, more than 35,000 brides were killed in India in dowry-related crimes, an average of nearly 20 women a day, year after year. Separately, the National Commission for Women recorded 4,383 dowry harassment complaints in a single recent year, accounting for roughly 17% of all complaints the Commission received. Campaigners believe the real figures are meaningfully higher, since many families still avoid filing complaints out of fear of stigma or retaliation against whatever support they have left.
Sexual violence against women and children tells a similarly stark story. Even using the most recent comprehensive national crime data, reported rape cases in India have averaged more than 86 a day. And when cases do make it into the country’s specialised fast-track courts, the system built specifically to speed up justice for rape and POCSO (child sexual abuse) cases after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case, the results are sobering. Of roughly 268,000 POCSO cases that went to trial in these courts, only around 8,900 ended in conviction, a conviction rate of about 3.3%. More than two lakh cases remain pending in these courts right now, arriving faster than the system can resolve them.
Dowry itself has been illegal in India since 1961. Sixty-five years later, the practice still shapes the overwhelming majority of Indian marriages in some form, openly or otherwise.
That gap, between a 65-year-old law, a specialised fast-track court system, and a reality that has barely moved, is the actual story here. Not one husband. Not one mother-in-law. Not one landlord. Not one constable. A legal framework exists, on paper, in real detail, layered over a culture and an enforcement machinery that together still let a daughter-in-law’s worth be treated as negotiable at the time of marriage and disposable after it, and that let a child’s safety depend entirely on the character of whichever adult happens to hold power over her, uniform or no uniform.
Every one of these stories ends the same way in the news copy: “an FIR has been registered.” It reads like resolution. It isn’t. It’s the beginning of a process that, for dowry deaths, abetment-to-suicide, and POCSO cases in India, frequently drags on for years, often ends in acquittal for lack of documented, contemporaneous evidence, and, based on the numbers above, rarely results in either conviction or real deterrence for the next family.
The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s provisions on dowry death and cruelty by a husband or his relatives exist and are, on paper, reasonably strong. The POCSO Act mandates that trials be completed within a year of the charge sheet being filed. What consistently fails is everything around these laws: police officers who treat a bride’s complaint as a “family matter” until she is dead; courts that have, in real cases, thrown out dowry harassment complaints for lacking specific dates or independent corroboration, evidence that is often nearly impossible for a woman still living inside the abusive household to gather; in-laws who understand that a first, second, even third complaint rarely leads anywhere; a social fabric that pressures women to “adjust” rather than leave; and families who, even when they suspect abuse, wait for a wedding photo to become a funeral photo before they act.
Srishti Kandhari’s mother has now filed that complaint. Beenu Jaiswal’s family has now filed theirs. It should not have taken a daughter’s death, or months of documented suffering, for either system to move.
There is a reason these cases keep breaking the same way. A woman is married into a household. The abuse, financial, physical, emotional, begins early and escalates quietly, often behind the same doors that hosted the wedding. She tells someone, sometimes repeatedly. Nothing structural changes. Eventually, either she is killed, or she reaches a point where she believes death is the only way out, and she leaves behind a note, a video, a message to a parent that begins with an apology she never should have had to make.
That is the part that should stop every reader cold: the apology. “Sorry, Mummy.” Not anger at the people who drove her to this point. An apology to the person she felt she was failing by not being able to survive them.
That reflex, a woman’s instinct to apologise for her own suffering, is not incidental. It is what decades of being told to adjust, to compromise, to think of the family’s reputation before her own safety, produces in the people it eventually destroys. It is the same reflex, in a different register, that keeps a 10-year-old from telling her mother sooner, or a woman from naming her abuser to police the first time, rather than the fifth.
This editorial isn’t interested in another “society must change” ending that asks nothing specific of anyone. Some concrete, unglamorous things would genuinely move these numbers.
None of this brings Srishti Kandhari back. None of it undoes what happened to Spandana, to Muskan in Bihar, to the woman in Greater Noida whose case is still unfolding, to Beenu Jaiswal’s still-unresolved complaint in Basti, to Anshu Devi in Jehanabad, to Kiran Kumari in Azamgarh, to the young man in Thane who died trying to protect his mother, to Aditya’s girlfriend still fighting for her life in a Meerut hospital, or to the four separate children in Goverdhan, in Sitapur, and in the two cases involving police constables, whose safety was betrayed by people who were supposed to be safe by definition: a landlord, a neighbour, an officer of the law. But every one of these stories is now part of the same, entirely preventable pattern, and the only real tribute available to any of them is making sure the next name on that list is one fewer.
A note on this piece: This editorial discusses suicide, domestic abuse, and child sexual abuse in a factual, journalistic context. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse or thoughts of self-harm in India, the National Commission for Women helpline (7827-170-170) and the TeleMANAS mental health helpline (14416) are available for support. To report or seek help for a child in an unsafe situation, contact Childline India (1098).
You finally sit down. Nothing urgent left on the list, or at least nothing that…
Envy is rarely loud. While open hostility is easy to spot, covert jealousy is often…
There is a hill in the Kumaon Himalayas that scientists, saints, and seekers have all…
If you are looking to break free from the weekday hustle and spice up your…
Places Time Forgot Most travel content chases what's new. This list does the opposite. Scattered…
From her early days on Disney Channel to dominating pop charts, producing hit series, and…
This website uses cookies.