Woman turning into 'man', marrying two women, harassing 'wife' for dowry reveals a sad reality
The second wife, whom Sen married in April 2016, had been a guest at her first wedding.
A woman has been arrested from Uttarakhand’s Nainital district for pretending to be a man, marrying two women, and torturing one of them for dowry.
According to the police, Krishna Sen alias Sweety Sen, from Uttar Pradesh, had created a fake profile on Facebook as a man through which she befriended a few women, and “married” one from Kathgodam in 2014.
The second wife, whom Sen married in April 2016, had been a guest at her first wedding. The first “wife” holds a double master’s degree, and her family coughed up Rs 8.5 lakh so Sen could set up a factory.
While this tale is bizarre, there are many things familiar about the script – men befriending women on social media to extort money from them, families willing to put up with outrageous demands from sons-in-law, and dowry being an accepted, default part of marriage.
Going by the police’s version, Sen harassed and physically assaulted his wife, extorted money from her family, and then married a second time, but she approached the police only after years.
A report in the Hindustan Times says: “Sen told the police during interrogation that she has been a tomboy since childhood and pretended to be a boy. She said she had cut her hair to look like a man and used to drive a motorcycle and smoke cigarettes. After marriage, she did not let her “wives” look at her body or touch her and used to have a “fake” physical relationship using sex toys, police said.”
It is difficult to wrap one’s head around several things here, but what comes across clearly is this: a woman had had an unsatisfactory marriage for four years, but not only did she not walk out of it, she continued to indulge her “husband’s” demands and got her family to pay him Rs 8 lakh.
The second wife, say police, had realised Sen was not a man, but did not speak out as she was promised money.
The police are now looking for Sen’s family, who came to the homes of both women for their engagement and wedding. It is not clear whether Sen’s first wife knew her husband was not a man at the time of filing the compliant. Before the marriage, Sen had posed as the “son of a CFL bulb businessman from Aligarh”.
Families being cheated after accepting men they meet online as sons-in-law is not unheard of. It is ironical that while Indian parents think a hundred times before allowing their daughters to talk to strangers, they are perfectly okay with them marrying strangers.
Also, the stigma of a “broken marriage” continues to make women, and even men, vulnerable – the society still looks down upon those who walk out of troublesome marriages, chaining people to spouses at the cost of happiness, dignity, and mental and physical well-being.
In all this, dowry continues to be acceptable, despite laws and the social progress we have made over centuries.
People such as Sen’s wives are not victims of one person alone, they are victims of a society that priortises women’s silence over speaking the truth, silent martyrdom over demanding justice, and of a system that has institutionalised dowry.
The fact that their families will have to shell out a massive sum to get them their only possible destiny – marriage – is responsible to a great degree for the deplorable state of women today. Being constantly treated as a responsibility at best and a burden at worst affects not just society’s attitude towards girls, but their own confidence and sense of self-worth, making them easy victims of exploitation.
When Sweety Sen took on a man’s clothes and mannerisms, she also took on the perverse power patriarchy gives a man, and allegedly used it to exploit other women. While the police probe the Kathgodam case, the society too needs to probe why it has become such a useful enabler for such crimes.