Accusing the "sick" Indian society for deaths of young women at the hands of their husbands and in-laws in the name of dowry, the Supreme Court has held that bride burning belongs to the "rarest of rare" category and deserves the death penalty.
Bride burning is a crime which deserves the death sentence because of the extreme depravity of mind involved in killing a young woman for the "lust of money", a Bench of Justices Markandeya Katju and Gyan Sudha Misra said in their judgment.
"The hallmark of a healthy society is the respect it shows to its women. Indian society has become a sick society," the court observed, adding that the evidence of this fact lay in the large number of cases coming up in the Supreme Court (and also in almost all courts in the country) in which young women are being killed by their husbands or by their in-laws by pouring kerosene on them and setting them on fire or by hanging/strangulating them.
Bride burning, the court said, is nothing short of murder. It explains that the term "rarest of rare" does not just mean that the act is uncommon, "it means that the act is brutal and barbaric". "And bride killing is certainly barbaric," Justice Katju said in its October 28 judgment.
The court was hearing an appeal filed by Satya Narayan Tiwari, who with his mother, killed his wife of three years in 2000 because her father could not afford to gift him a Maruti car. Forensic report showed that she was hung to death and then her body was burnt in an effort to deceive the police that she had committed suicide in their house.
The trial court acquitted the duo for lack of evidence, but the high court sentenced them to life under Section 304B (dowry death) of the IPC and six months under the Dowry Prohibition Act.
The jail term was to run concurrently.
But for the Supreme Court, the prosecution had not done enough by booking the mother-son duo for dowry death alone. Justice Katju said the state should have charged them with murder and fought for death penalty.
"In fact, it was really a case under Section 302 (murder) IPC and death sentence should have been imposed in such a case, but since no charge under Section 302 IPC was levelled, we cannot do so," he wrote.
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