Keeping your wife's salary & ATM card isn't a right - it's economic abuse

On the Karutthu Kannammaa page that was reported by lentils who can't take women speaking out, we received so many messages from Indian women who are stripped off their financial independence - they need to beg for money from their husband and bear insults from the milkman and newspaper man because of payment delays.

These women are either denied the right to work and earn or have their salary or ATM card confiscated by their husband and in-laws. The husband and his family make sure that the woman is completely dependent on them for everything and is helpless.

One scene in the movie Provoked, starring Aishwarya Rai and Naveen Andrews, Aishwarya's battered housewife character, Kiranjit Kaur would spend some money for food and her abusive husband character would threaten to stamp hot iron on her face for that.



This real life story of dowry demand cum economic abuse is heartbreaking - note the point where she went from weighing 56 kgs to 36 kgs. She was locked inside a house by her husband in a foreign country without food and water. He purposely broke the tap so that she won't have water to drink.



Well, the above true stories made into a movie and disclosed in a talk show are extreme cases. Equally atrocious is just because a woman goes into her husband's house, she's expected to not give back to her birth family that has raised her so that she can go into another house and add value there.

A son is expected to look after his parents and siblings after marriage - Indian Supreme Court even passed a verdict that if a man's wife thwarts him from looking after his family, he can divorce her. Women thwarted from looking after their birth family after marriage is generally accepted as the great Indian culture - this is the root cause of female foeticide and infanticide and discrimination against females within family, from food to education opportunities. What a great culture!

You can't accept a son not looking after his parents after his marriage? In the same way, you shouldn't accept a daughter not looking after her parents after her marriage.

Financial independence is human dignity. Women are not owned by anyone - fulfilling their needs and the needs of their birth family is their human right.