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Anti-dowry heroines of India

AFP, New Delhi
A young software engineering student who earlier this month sent her groom to prison for demanding a huge dowry promoted a nationwide campaign against greedy suitors.
Nisha Sharma, 21, attained celebrity status when she scrapped her wedding at the last minute and called the police after her schoolteacher suitor, Munish Dalal, allegedly demanded 1.2 million rupees (25,000 US dollars) in dowry.
Despite being banned by law in the 1980s as a non-bailable offense, it remains common for the family of the groom in India's male-dominated society to demand a dowry of cash or goods.
Munish was arrested under the Dowry Prevention Act and Sharma has vowed to pursue a judicial battle to punish the man who wanted to marry her only if she coughed up
the cash as well as an expensive trousseau.
"First, I was afraid for my life and then I became very, very angry and I then decided to call off my marriage," said Sharma, whose father, D.D., was allegedly roughed up for not handing over the cash dowry.
"I have the total support of my family, my parents and my friends
because what I have done is to begin a fight against injustice.
"I call on all women today that even if a single penny is demanded by their in-laws, they should say no. They should not marry into that family and only in this way the scourge may end," she told AFP.
Official figures show that the number of women killed by their in-laws for not fetching an attrac-
tive dowry rose from 5,500 in 1996 to around 7,000 last year.
Anti-dowry activists and NGOs say the figure is much higher and estimate that a women is burned to death over dowry-related incidents every 10 minutes.
"It is the greed that leads to dowry deaths, " said Sharma, whose modest home in New Delhi's suburb of Noida has been
packed with MPs, rights activists and Bollywood stars bearing promises of help since she called off the wedding on May 13.
After Sharma's case made headlines, two other women in New Delhi walked out on planned weddings after last-moment dowry demands.
Earlier this week, 20-year-old Farzana Zaki called the police when her husband and father-in-law refused to take her home for want of dowry.
Newlywed Anupama Singh refused to go with her husband when he asked for 800,000 rupees (16,600 US dollars) in dowry from her stunned parents, police said.
"But please, I am not a celebrity. I am just an ordinary girl, " said Sharma, a day after she was honoured, along with police officers killed by Islamic militants, by the privately-run All India Anti-Terrorist Front.
"There are many kinds of terrorism and
we honour all those who have had the courage to fight it in every way they can," Front chief M. S. Bitta said, describing Sharma's step as a "decisive action" against dowry.
Sharma, who since May 13 has attracted several marriage proposals including from Afghanistan, appeared unfazed by all the attention and said she would concentrate on her studies.