On the morning her family found her, Twisha’s death had already been scripted by everyone except the investigators. The initial post-mortem report noted ligature marks. The nylon rope that her in-laws’ neighbours distinctly recalled seeing on the terrace that morning was never recovered, never tagged, never produced before the magistrate. Within 72 hours of her death, a media narrative had overtaken the forensic one: anonymous sources whispered to local reporters about “erratic behaviour”, a “history of depression”, and alleged drug use. None of it was ever substantiated in a chargesheet. But it did not need to be. The media trial had served its purpose – it muddied the waters just enough to give investigators an excuse to look the other way.
This procedural failure is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of a deeper institutional problem – one in which the machinery of investigation, prosecution, and public discourse collectively conspires to ensure that the crime of dowry death remains simultaneously rampant and unpunished. And critically, Twisha’s case makes an argument that no poverty statistic can: her husband held a postgraduate degree, her in-laws were prosperous, English-speaking professionals. If entitlement were a disease of the uneducated or the economically desperate, her story could not exist. That it does reveals that dowry death is not a relic of a feudal past, but a thoroughly modern pathology.
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The Entitlement Framework
Dowry is the proof of a deeply entrenched sense of entitlement in our society. The word “aowry” may make an urban Indian think of a village scene, wherein a frightened bride in a rural household is being married off to a family while her father gathers his life earnings and property to give to the groom’s family as a gift to accept their daughter. This image, however, is not only highly inaccurate but also dangerous, because it allows the educated, affluent, and the aspirational to exempt themselves from accountability.
The logic of dowry in urban areas is, however, different from rural areas. Here, dowry demand is based on the qualifications and achievements of the groom or his family members. This status makes his family feel “entitled” to dowry in the form of gifts or payments for the wedding functions. The Supreme Court addressed this issue in Rajinder Singh v. State of Punjab (2015), ruling that the word “dowry” must be understood broadly. The Court held that any demand for property or valuable items tied to the marriage – whether asked for before, during, or any time after the wedding – is considered a dowry demand. Because of this, failing to give into these demands, no matter the area, results in cruel behaviour toward the bride and her family by the groom’s side.
The Law On Paper
The Indian Parliament identified this deeply entrenched societal ill and responded to it with considerable force, or so they thought, with the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. It was the first ever legislative attempt to criminalise this practice. The failure of this Act could be seen in its light enforcement and poor prosecution, as nothing in the practice has changed apart from the word itself, by calling these transactions “gifts”.
The 1986 amendment to the IPC added Section 304B (now Section 80 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023) to make “Dowry Deaths” a specific crime. To use this law, certain facts must be proven: an unnatural death within seven years of marriage, and proof that the woman faced cruelty or harassment for dowry “soon before” her death. In Kans Raj v. State of Punjab (2000), the Supreme Court explained that “soon before” does not mean right before her death but that there must be a clear and direct link between dowry harassment and her death. Once these facts are proven, the law presumes the groom’s family is guilty unless they can prove they are innocent. As the Supreme Court confirmed in Sher Singh v. State of Haryana (2015), once the prosecution proves these basic facts, a heavy burden shifts to the husband and his family to show they did not cause the death. While this shift in the burden of proof sounds empowering by mandating the accused to prove the reasons of the unnatural death of the bride, its practice has been quite questionable. The power under this provision has been hollowed out overtime, not by legislature, but rather by the investigative authorities, by failing to investigate the first link in the chain.
Chargesheeting And Convictions: A Statistical Paradox
A proof of the discussion above can be seen through the NCRB reports of 2023 and 2024. While there is a year-on-year decrease in the number of Dowry Death cases in India, with 6,156 new cases in 2023 and 5,737 new cases in 2024, the charge-sheeting rate for these cases also remains high, with about 85-90% cases making it to court. However, the conviction rates for these cases remain at 35-40%, showing a considerable difference between the two.
Based on this difference between the number of matters reaching the court and those that result in conviction, two distinct explanations stem from the same. One, there is a significant investigative and prosecutorial failure. A case built on a statutory presumption is only as strong as the preliminary investigation that triggers it. If the nylon rope is not recovered – if the forensic evidence is not collected, the witnesses not examined, the call records not checked within the first 48 hours- the presumption has nothing to attach to. The presumption of the prosecution collapses, not because the law is weak, but because the foundational facts were never assembled. This is the failure that Twisha’s case exemplifies.
The second explanation is more uncomfortable; thus, it must be stated without bias. It may be the case that not every death post-marriage could be considered a dowry death strictly under Section 304B. A woman who is forced to take her own life due to sustained emotional abuse, general marital cruelty, or mental health neglect is a genuine victim of violence. However, a strict reading of the dowry death law might not cover all types of marital violence. The Supreme Court highlighted this in Satbir Singh v. State of Haryana (2021), stating that courts must find a clear and direct connection between the cruelty faced and the specific demand for dowry. Without proving this exact link, the case for dowry death falls apart, leading to an acquittal. To stop case numbers from being falsely inflated, general marital cruelty or emotional abuse should be filed under its own specific section, like Section 498A of the IPC (now Section 85 of the BNS), rather than under dowry death.
Both explanations must be held simultaneously. Genuine cases are failing because of botched investigations. Misclassified cases are failing because the law cannot stretch to fit facts it was not designed for. And connecting the two does injustice to both the genuine victim and the falsely accused.
The Media Trial
The case of Twisha Sharma introduces a third dimension of failure that is neither legislative nor investigative: the media trial. The concept of media trial relies on a simple principle that before the confirmation of any reliable evidence, a television cycle already pronounces its verdict, one that keeps changing as more information is disclosed.
The drug-use narrative that circulated within 72 hours of Twisha’s death was unverified, unsourced, and unprosecuted. It served one purpose: to shift public sympathy away from the family of the dead woman and toward the family of the accused. This is not an accidental feature of media coverage of dowry deaths. It is a structural tendency. High-profile cases involving educated families get news coverage that tries to find “balance” by bringing up the dead woman’s personal history – as if her mental health or lifestyle habits matter legally when deciding if her in-laws demanded a car and killed her when they didn’t get it. The Supreme Court has repeatedly warned against this. In Manu Sharma v. State (NCT of Delhi) (2010), the Court explicitly stated that media trials are dangerous because they decide a person’s guilt in public long before the court can examine the actual evidence, which hurts the fairness of the trial. Although the Press Council has guidelines to stop this kind of harmful reporting , they are usually ignored in practice.
A Need For Dual Reforms
The path forward cannot be purely technical, and this is where most reform conversations go wrong. Legal and investigative reform is necessary. Police training in the forensic handling of unnatural death scenes, mandatory fast-track timelines for evidence collection in Section 304B cases, prosecutorial guidelines for the distinction between dowry death and dowry-adjacent cruelty, and enforceable judicial standards for media reporting during the investigation phase – all of these are achievable within the existing constitutional framework, and all of them would materially improve conviction rates in genuine cases while reducing wrongful prosecution in ambiguous ones.
But these reforms address the machinery. They do not address the fuel. The entitlement framework that converts a marriage into a transaction, that prices a man’s education as an asset to be monetised by his family, that treats a daughter-in-law’s compliance as a condition of her survival – this framework will survive every amendment to every penal code, because it operates upstream of the law. It lives in matrimonial advertisements that list “family background” and “settled abroad” as credentials. It lives in the cultural expectation that a bride’s family bears the cost of a groom’s family’s social status. This entitlement framework is not restricted to the poor, illiterate and rural families, but rather stems from a structurally backward form of patriarchy being followed in India. This mindset is what sustains the whole idea of a woman being a liability, the man an asset, and thus the need to attach some valuables along with her in order for the “asset’s” family to accept the “liability”.
Social justice in this domain will only arrive when the entitlement framework is named as the pathology it is – not a tradition, not a custom, not a misunderstanding – and confronted as directly in drawing rooms and wedding halls as Section 304B confronts it in courtrooms. The law presumed guilt. Now society must stop presuming innocence for a culture that kills.
(The writer is a prominent activist and advocate)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author