The price of ‘adjusting’: Daughters pay with their lives

By Charanjit AhujaThe smoke rising from a funeral pyre carries with it a heavy, suffocating question that India has failed to answer for over six decades. As the flames consume yet another life, they burn through the carefully constructed illusion of our societal progress, exposing a hollow core. First, that smoke rose for Twisha Sharma, a 33-year-old former model and actor whose name once commanded attention on screens, but is now permanently etched into the grim ledger of India’s domestic failures. As her brother, Harshit, stepped forward to light the fire, her devastated parents stood paralyzed by a grief no parent should ever endure—the unnatural tragedy of burying a child.

Miles away, in Greater Noida, the family of 24-year-old Deepika Nagar was trapped in a different kind of nightmare. Caught in a bureaucratic maze, they ran frantically from one police station to another, denied even the basic, heartbreaking dignity of holding her body after she allegedly “fell” from a third-floor terrace.

Meanwhile, in Jaipur, the final moments of 35-year-old Anu Meena unfolded with horrific modernity: she took her last breath while on a video call with her husband. She left behind a ten-year-old son, Mahir, who had to calmly explain to investigators how his father would routinely come home, smash the television, and beat his mother. Three lives. Three distinct worlds—spanning the glamorous lights of the entertainment industry, the lucrative circles of NCR real estate, and the secure households of senior government officials.

Yet, all three women were bound to the exact same ancient, lethal apparatus: the institution of dowry. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) 2024 Crime in India report, 5,737 dowry deaths were recorded nationwide in a single year. That is an average of 15 daughters lost every single day.

While we celebrate economic growth, technological revolutions, and global footprints, a woman is broken, burned, or driven to a ceiling fan every 90 minutes because an insatiable marital household demanded more. We comfort ourselves with a collective lie: that dowry is a relic of the past, a primitive custom confined to remote, impoverished villages where education has not yet reached. We like to believe that financial independence, higher education, and modern “love marriages” act as a natural shield against regressive traditions. The tragic realities of Twisha, Deepika, and Anu completely shatter this protective myth.

Look closely at the profiles of the accused. Twisha’s husband is a practicing advocate, a man trained to defend the law; her mother-in-law is a retired district judge, a woman who spent her career dispensing justice from a elevated bench. Deepika’s husband was a successful real estate broker, well-versed in the metrics of wealth and property. Anu’s husband was an Executive Engineer in the Public Works Department, a senior state official responsible for building the very infrastructure of our country.

These were not desperate, uneducated individuals operating in the shadows of illiteracy. They were the custodians of our legal system, the elite of our economy, and the architects of our civic state. This reveals a terrifying truth: education has completely failed to civilize our domestic spaces. It has merely sophisticated the cruelty.

A degree does not erase entitlement; it often inflates it. When financial independence or a prestigious career is brought into a marriage by a woman, it is not viewed by the patriarchal household as a sign of equality. Instead, it is viewed as an asset to be hijacked. Deepika’s family alleged that the harassment began within just two months of her wedding.

Despite marrying with a lavish array of gifts—including a Scorpio car, Rs. 12 lakh in cash, and gold jewellery—the demands escalated to a Toyota Fortuner and an additional Rs. 51 lakh. When those demands met a wall, her property worth crores became the target. She was allegedly given a brutal, explicit ultimatum: “transfer the land or die.” When the very people trained to write, enforce, and interpret the law are the ones accused of turning homes into extortion centers, where does an Indian daughter turn for safety? During the Supreme Court’s suo motu hearing regarding the handling of Twisha’s case, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta made an emotional remark that reverberated through the courtroom: “For parents, it is better to have a divorced daughter than a dead one.” It is a profound, well-intentioned sentiment.

Yet, the very fact that such a statement must be articulated by the highest legal officers of the country exposes the depth of our cultural pathology. Why must it take a casket, an autopsy, and a media trial for us to realize that a divorced daughter is preferable to a dead one? Why is the stigma of a broken marriage still heavier than the threat of a broken body? The Fatal Cultural Conditioning to ‘Adjust’ The ultimate tragedy of these cases is not just the physical brutality of the perpetrators, but the silent, systematic complicity of our cultural conditioning.

From the moment an Indian girl is born, she is implicitly trained in the art of endurance. She is taught to swallow insults, tolerate micro-aggressions, shrink her presence, and “adjust” to whatever environment she is placed into. This endurance is packaged and praised as a virtue—the ultimate hallmark of a “good Indian woman.” We train our daughters to be resilient to a fault, teaching them that preserving the family’s “honour” is entirely their responsibility. Anu Meena’s family had repeatedly urged her to return home, to escape the physical and verbal abuse she endured for years.

Yet, she stayed. She returned to the matrimonial home time and again, holding onto the fragile, desperate hope that her husband would change, accepting his post-violence apologies because society told her that saving her marriage was worth any personal cost. Even her young son, Mahir, became a witness to this exhausting cycle of endurance. He recalled how his mother, suffering from severe drops in blood pressure brought on by systemic stress, would quietly ask him to mix salt water for her so she could gather the strength to stand up and face the household again.

This is the conditioning that endangers lives. We do not teach our daughters how to identify the early warning signs of an abusive partner; we teach them how to navigate his temper. We do not celebrate a woman who walks away from a toxic environment; we validate her only when she suffers in silence. We celebrate her endurance until that endurance kills her.

When Deepika Nagar called her mother at 2:00 PM on that fateful Thursday, she wasn’t calling to chat; she was making a distress call, screaming that she was being assaulted over land transfers. Her mother immediately dropped everything and rushed to her daughter’s home, arriving by 8:00 PM.

But six hours in a hostile territory is an eternity. By the time the mother arrived, a crowd had already gathered, and the young woman’s life had been snuffed out. Marriage as a Commercial Transaction At its core, the persistence of dowry reflects a fundamental refusal to see women as full human beings.

Despite being outlawed by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, the practice has simply changed its vocabulary. It has been re-branded as “gifts,” “customary hospitality,” or “voluntary tokens of love.” But let us call it what it truly is: a commercial transaction masquerading as a holy union. It is a financial negotiation where a woman’s safety and survival are held hostage to the volatile market demands of her in-laws. A luxury vehicle, a specific bank balance, a piece of inherited real estate—the demands are endless because greed is a bottomless pit.

When the transactional value falls short, the physical devaluation of the woman begins. What makes this systemic failure even more painful is the absolute lack of remorse or accountability displayed by the perpetrators. In the aftermath of Anu’s death, her brother revealed that her husband showed no signs of regret, casually remarking that spending a few days in jail “would not be a problem” for him. This arrogance stems from a deep awareness of how slowly the wheels of justice turn in our country.

Perpetrators know that investigations can be manipulated, that social status can buy temporary silence, and that initial autopsies can be muddled—as was feared in Twisha’s case, where the High Court had to step in to order a second post-mortem by AIIMS Delhi to ensure an impartial probe. The Madhya Pradesh High Court has now quashed the anticipatory bail of former judge Giribala Singh in the Twisha Sharma death case. In its 17-page order, vacation judge Devnarayan Mishra said, “In the light of the factual aspects of the case and the allegations levelled against the respondent (Giribala Singh), the anticipatory bail order dated May 15, 2026 passed by the 10th Additional Sessions Judge, Bhopal for the offences punishable under the Sections 80(2), 85, 3(5) of BNS, 2023 and Sections 3 & 4 of Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, is hearby quashed.” In the meanwhile, a Bhopal court has remanded Twisha’s husband, Samarth Singh, to CBI custody for seven days. The Bar Council of India has suspended his licence to practise law.

Following the remand, a CBI team escorted Samarth to Giribala Singh’s residence in the Katara Hills area for a detailed reconstruction of the scene and further interrogation. The legal battles for Twisha, Deepika, and Anu will now play out in the crowded corridors of our judiciary. Senior advocates will debate sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, forensic experts will analyze injury marks, and trial courts will argue over the semantics of interim bail. The Central Bureau of Investigation will file its reports, and the public eye will eventually wander to the next headline.

But the real trial does not belong to the courts. It belongs to us—the parents, the educators, the neighbors, and the silent observers of collective society. The legal system can only punish the criminal after the crime has been committed; it cannot rewrite the cultural script that leads to the violence. We cannot continue to raise our daughters to be sacrificial lambs on the altar of marital stability.

It is time to completely dismantle the toxic architecture of “adjustment.” We must stop conditioning our girls to tolerate cruelty as an inevitable part of the marriage pact. We must explicitly teach them that their dignity is non-negotiable, that their life is worth infinitely more than any societal expectation, and that walking away from abuse is an act of courage, not a badge of shame. More importantly, we must change how we raise our sons, decoupling their self-worth and financial ambition from the assets of the women they marry. Until we stop treating weddings as business mergers and daughters as liabilities to be traded away with a premium, the daily body count will continue to rise.

The next time a daughter reaches out in distress, or the next time we witness the subtle, early signs of domestic extortion in our own circles, we must refuse to look away. We must stop telling our daughters to compromise. We must start bringing them home alive.