In India’s conservative society, remaining a bachelor is not an option.
A new bride would help his parents, he says. “They would have had an easier life. They would have had someone to cook and to take care of them.”
She should clean. She should run the household. She should bear children. And Narinder plans to share her with his two unmarried brothers, who live in the same house.
But he cannot find a bride in his village, where so few exist. So, he contacted an agent to find one from another state.
Narinder may be a victim of the heavily-skewed male sex ratio in his community; more broadly, the desire to buy a bride is also fueling bride trafficking.
Decades of sex-selective abortion have created an acute lack of women in certain parts of India. Traffickers capitalize on the shortage by recruiting or kidnapping women ensnared in poverty to sell as brides. It’s a cycle influenced by poverty and medical technologies, but one that ultimately is perpetuated by India’s attitude towards women.
India grapples with rape and sexual violence
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“Even the village children talk to us like dogs,” the sisters say.
Faced with the allegations, the husbands maintain they paid more than $2,000 to traffickers, before they married the sisters. They emphasize that the men are stigmatized too, because they didn’t manage to find a bride locally and instead had to buy one of the “paro” women.
“Patriarchy is so entrenched in our society. Girls are unwelcome visitor(s) in our own homes, and that’s how they are treated,” says Muttreja, the activist.
The men and women alike speak of their situation with surprising frankness.
The public outrage after the Delhi rape case has shown India’s ability for self-criticism and the willingness of a significant part of its society to leave behind a deeply entrenched patriarchy.
But this vicious cycle of aborting girls, kidnapping women and selling off brides continues — the byproduct of a culture that sees sons as a blessing and daughters as a curse.
Read: No quick fix for India’s rape crisis
