Among the indictments was one of police apathy and pervasive refusal to consider dowry deaths as no more than ``a private matter'' within the family, or ``cooking accidents''(as the police records describe it). The other was of the tendency of our courts to go strictly by the letter of the law rather than the spirit, so that acquittals of the accused become routine due to ``lack of evidence'' (even though ``witnesses'' are impossible to produce, in a crime that takesplace in the privacy of a bedroom or kitchen). As some of the cases heard by the Commission showed, even after taking bribes the police failed to gather and file sufficient evidence to facilitate a conviction. The Commission further recorded its ``distress over the attitude of parents who refuse to receive (back) married daughters, and persuade them to return to violent marriages''.

Ponder over these remarks, one about the apathy of the official machinery and the other about our social responses. What they add up to is the fact that in today's society, married women are not even guaranteed the right to live.

Put that way, the horror of the problem sinks in, but that is the reality. We have made spectacular progress in science and technology and have joined the select group of nations with nuclear capability. Instant communications and e-mails link us to global networks, our software engineers enjoy worldwide demand for solving the Y2K problem. We boast of the green revolution and the white revolution, andour bold liberalisation policies, but where is the social revolution, the liberalisation of minds towards greater gender equity, and the transformation of Constitutional promises of individuals' rights to life and dignity, into ground realities?

We talk about the criminalisation of politics. What about the rising criminalisation of family relationships even at the domestic level, so that a woman who becomes a wife can be burned to death, strangled or poisoned (or driven to suicide) with impunity, legal immunity and social apathy, by those who have made solemn religious or legal promises to protect her for life? In one recent case, the bride was kicked in the stomach by her footballer husband. Her liver burst and she died. She was one of the hundred women who die on an average, each month, in dowry related fatalities, in Bangalore -- the Silicon Valley of India.

Has our modernisation merely meant that instead of the steel utensils and two thousand rupees demanded as dowry 50 years ago, our demands havenow got upgraded to VCRs and honeymoons abroad and a few lakhs in cash? Once upon a time, when we were a ``backward'', newly-independent nation, brides were largely unlettered and economically dependent. Today, women with doctorates, post-graduate medical degrees, and well-paid jobs as scientists and lecturers figure among the victims of dowry harassment. At the Truth Commission hearings, a neurosurgeon of a well-known hospital described how his sister had been killed for dowry. Another bereaved parent of Kolhapur has had to suspend his career as a consultant in order to run from pillar to post over the last five years, demanding justice. Other parents confessed that they had known about the torture being inflicted on their daughters but had advised them to ``adjust'' rather than walk out of the marriage, since there were younger daughters in the family to be married off.

Until these realities change, until the police and courts become more sensitive to the horror of women being killed for failure to bringgifts in cash and kind, till parents start taking pride in daughters and infuse them with a sense of self-worth, till society stops punishing a woman for daring to walk out of a violent marriage, we will continue to see relentless additions to the statistics on dowry deaths. Especially as Dasera, Divali, and Christmas draw near, since festival time means demands for gifts from the bride's families. Even in these ``modern'', ``liberalised'' nineties.

Narasimhan is the author of `Born Unfree'