Dowry Deaths and the Elite Capture of Feminism

Why has elite women’s representation failed to benefit women at large?

Nikki Bhati, the young bride who died after being burned alive in front of her son by her husband and mother-in-law over unmet dowry demand

A stone’s throw from the national capital, a young woman was burned alive in front of her seven-year-old son for the unmet demand of a Rs 35 lakh dowry. Because there was a video and the boy’s tearful testimony, the case attracted national attention. More dowry murders were reported in quick succession: one woman burned alive by her constable husband in Aroha, another forced to drink acid. NCRB reports that around 20 women are murdered every day over dowry. Reported rapes have averaged around 30,000 a year - about 86 women a day. Orders of magnitude more are harassed and assaulted, creating social sanction that normalises these crimes.

Ever since this case surfaced, one thought has been running through my mind. In the midst of such life-and-death questions for millions of women in our country, how did the feminist discourse become so preoccupied with questions of representation for women like me? The next obvious question is whether there’s been an elite capture of the feminist discourse.

This is not to deny that elite women too get the short end of the stick ‘cause of their gender. For instance, moral policing, unequal distribution of domestic responsibilities, and questions of safety when traveling at night are still real, even in elite society.

But two things stand out. First, the sheer stakes and scale of dowry, sexual assault, and everyday violence dwarf the niche concerns of the privileged. Next to these realities, such issues appear almost aesthetic, especially because these concerns are often mitigated by resources such as domestic workers and dedicated transport. Second and more importantly, it is not clear that the empowerment of women like me has translated into gains for Indian women at large.

Is it fair to expect elite women to demonstrate more proactive solidarity with ordinary women? Yes. If representation is demanded in the name of empowerment, then those who have benefited most have a responsibility to use their platforms to amplify the struggles of the majority. The push for elite representation cannot remain preoccupied with ever-higher gains for a tiny minority (in fact, the one area where women’s representation has led to genuine, if uneven, social change is at the grassroots - in panchayats and wards. This experience should now be extended into the bureaucracy and administrative services, where some states have already begun to experiment).

There is no question that the glass ceiling is real and that pushing these boundaries entails real struggle and exhaustion. However, the overwhelming focus on these issues is often justified by arguing that elite feminist victories - workplace harassment laws, quotas on corporate boards, the visibility of women leaders - spill over to benefit women more broadly. These gains create laws, norms, and symbols that are supposed to cascade downward. This is true but in practice, gains have plateaued because we are increasingly failing to connect with mass struggles.

In our mass political discourse, ordinary women are treated as welfare beneficiaries through cash transfers and, in policy discourse, as caretakers of family welfare with conclusions such as “money given to women is spent on family, not alcohol”. Despite all talk of the woman voter and women’s representation in legislatures and corporations, women have not emerged as a group with a common gendered-consciousness and political force. Such consciousness cannot emerge if public discourse is dominated by elite-friendly issues with little resonance in the lives of the women at large.

This is why the disproportionate focus on elite issues jars. While women are dismissed, assaulted, even murdered daily in their own homes, elite conversation often centers on representation, interruptions during meetings, or menstruation leave. These concerns are not trivial, but they are “safe” and easily taken up by corporations or legislatures. Their very friendliness to elite institutions makes them disproportionately visible - and status quoist. By contrast, confronting dowry or sexual violence demands reckoning with entrenched kinship, social norms and economic structures.

Dowry and violence against women thrive because they are embedded in social and economic structures - in caste, in property, in the economy, in institutions, and a certain kind of in-your-face consumption fueled by the logic of capitalism. This is not a call for communism, but we cannot ignore how conspicuous elite lifestyles have fed aspirations for materialism and consumption that inevitably instrumentalise the weak (young brides, gig workers etc). Dowry today has kept pace with modern consumption: cars, houses, cash, and status goods woven into marriage transactions. The same culture that normalises consumption as empowerment for elite women also legitimises commodification of women’s lives for the husband’s family.

Even now, women in India remain underrepresented in property sole-ownership. Even as private women’s hostels proliferate demonstrating a clear need for support, there are a paltry 500 working women’s hostels across the entire country. There is a similarly small number of domestic violence shelters (under 1,000) across the entire country. The 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act gave daughters equal inheritance rights but in practice they are forced to sign relinquishment deeds. We need more proactive state support for our women and we need procedural safeguards to ensure enforcement of existing laws. Examples include automatic registration of daughters in property rights, independent legal counselling before relinquishment, legal aid centers, accountability of the police and courts for low conviction rates. In fact, for every law, there needs to be a review of the institutional reforms and state support required for effective enforcement. And yes, we must review all laws where the law itself sanctions seeing women as less than men. How we address some of the intersectionalities and consequent anxieties should be discussed with seriousness and sensitivity but these issues cannot be boxed indefinitely.

At the same time, it is evident that legislation and criminalisation alone are inadequate. Dowry, rape, and murder are already illegal. Laws have little force when social sanction persists. Women’s economic participation alone will also not guarantee bargaining power if norms don’t shift. Nikki Bhati appears to have the means of economic independence from her beauty parlour - and in any case, there are numerous examples of economically independent women bearing the brunt of gendered violence.

Ending dowry and other gendered violence will require not just punishment but a social movement. Such a movement cannot be framed only in terms of antagonism. Women - and even their hapless parents - trapped in abusive conditions cannot always be expected to fight pitched battles against the very families and systems in which they are embedded. Prosecution for such criminality is of course necessary, but conviction rates belie how much social and systemic sanction violence against women has.

What is needed too is persuasion from the top-down and society-wide. Instead of showing only women as beneficiaries of such a movement or men needing to be tamed (in Nikki Bhati’s case, the mother-in-law was an active participant in assaulting her), we need a larger values-driven campaign that imagines a different kind of family life and shows how commodifying half of society impoverishes all of society, and where we delink consumption from empowerment.

Finally, elite women must accept responsibility. We claim seats at the table in the name of empowerment for all women. This claim obliges us to use our visibility to keep substantive mass issues in the spotlight. If the feminist movement is to have credibility, those who benefit most from elite feminism must carry mass struggles into the spaces of media, law, and power. Otherwise, feminism risks becoming another language of elite privilege, leaving the most vulnerable women behind.

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