Our daughters want to choose their destiny, will they be able to?

I was a teenager when I looked at the newspaper one morning and saw a photo of three sisters who had died by suicide by hanging themselves from the ceiling fan in their home in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh. The younger sisters were closer to my own age. The photo had been clicked before the bodies were taken down — the girls were suspended in mid-air, their necks broken, their faces recognisable. The image has been impossible to forget.

The accompanying text narrated a story of the family’s economic struggle and their anxiety over their inability to arrange dowry for their daughters’ marriage according to community norms. The young women had executed a suicide pact to relieve their parents of the socio-cultural burden of raising daughters in a society where they are perceived as an encumbrance and a potential risk to the honour of the family.

It was a wake-up call I was not prepared for. It was one I would have to learn to reckon with.

If I was growing up in modern India that was determined to shake off the multiple oppressions of gender, caste, and economic oppressions, then how could young women like me find themselves so desperate that they were unable to imagine a life where they would be able to transcend the shackles of familial expectations? Why did they not feel the agency to fight to live? Why was there no social support system that could hand-hold them out of their distress and show them possibilities that existed?

It was the 1980s and the news had shaken me at a deeply personal level. I cut out the photo and news report from the paper and stuck it in my diary. That diary is still lying in a cupboard in my home, reminding me that I owe it to young persons to support them when they are at the end of their tether.

Decades have passed, and I am now a parent of teenage daughters. They browsed the news last week and saw the stories of two Kashmiri women, Manmeet and Danmeet, who recorded videos of themselves in which each one speaks with articulate confidence that she has married a Muslim man against the wishes of her Sikh family, and she stands by her right to make an independent choice for herself. A third video surfaced of a woman called Khadija, formerly known as Viran Pal Kaur, who also asserted that she had married and converted to Islam out of her own free will.

“People who are trying to spin our stories as cases of ‘love jihad’ are trying to break the brotherhood between Sikhs and Muslims in Kashmir,” says Khadija, who has asked for police protection for her husband and herself.

Sikh organisations claimed they were approached by the distressed families and as protests mounted, the SGPC chief, while coming out strongly against the alleged forcible conversion, said though they tried to convince the girl to convert back, she “did not relent and as such we will not force anything on her”.

Going by the videos, the young women have trudged a long way in asserting their right to choose their destiny and taking responsibility for their actions.

Yet these stories are in the national news because socio-political barriers that seek to use gender and religious identity against young Indians have not backed down, even in 2021. Two of the three women have returned to their families, apparently with the backing of the state police and community leaders.

Images of Manmeet, remarried to a Sikh man within a day and brought to Delhi, are circulating on the same social media platforms that host her own video asserting that her family is harassing her. Her husband, Shahid Bhat, is in jail, even though the couple has shared court documents to prove the legality of their marriage.

How do we explain this act of controlling the life choices of young people — their decisions of who to love and marry — to our own sons and daughters? How do we allow the state to indulge in such acts where the police enable the separation of a legally wedded couple?

Our development indices may show that India has progressed in the 75 years of being an Independent country, but we continue to perpetuate toxic ideas of community honour and manipulative, dysfunctional family systems that prey on our own children, even those who have turned adult.

“A casteless society can be built only by inter-caste and inter-faith marriages,” writes Kawalpreet Kaur, a young lawyer, in a Facebook post, reminding us of the progressive values enshrined in the Constitution of our country. India’s daughters are speaking up for themselves and everyone else. If the rest of us cannot stand by them, the least we can do is get out of their way.

— The writer is a filmmaker & author.

natasha.badhwar@gmail.com