New Delhi Letter:Sikh religious leaders have issued an edict to end lavish weddings among their community that involve days of bacchanalian revelry fuelled by gallons of alcohol, mounds of tandoori chicken and exotic food, as a measure to discourage demands for a dowry.
By enforcing austere weddings, the Delhi Sikh Temple Management Committee also hopes to prevent the burgeoning practice of female infanticide practised by many Sikhs despite it being outlawed.
"It is this splurge of wealth on ceremonies which is promoting dowry and practices like female foeticide," committee head Paramjit Singh Sarna declared to a community that likes to flaunt its wealth and celebrates weddings ostentatiously with cocktails and banquets, often lasting several days.
A simple wedding concluded in the auspicious pre-noon period inside a Sikh temple followed by a teetotal and vegetarian reception is recommended.
Those straying from these ascetic guidelines will not be issued wedding certificates, Sarna warned.
Girls across India, especially among Sikhs, are considered a liability as expensive dowries have to be paid at their weddings that invariably cost a tidy fortune.
Even the poorest of Sikh peasants are under tremendous peer pressure to organise lavish weddings, often by taking high-interest loans.
And once the bride refuses to satisfy incessant demands by her in-laws for money and goods, she can be either starved, administered frequent beatings or even "jailed" inside her bridal house.
If the unfortunate bride's family declines to pay up, many parents, in connivance with their sons, force her into an inflammable nylon sari, douse her with paraffin and set her alight, claiming that she caught fire while cooking.
There is, however, widespread scepticism over the Sikh clergy's ability to enforce the ban that has triggered widespread outrage in the community.
"We will spread the message from our 12 gurdwaras (temples) in Delhi," Sarna said recently, adding that an 11-member committee for each area would spread the message door to door.
Families will be sent letters and noticeboards outside gurdwaras will display the rules, he declared.
"The clergy has no right to tell us how to organise weddings. They are not the moral police and we do not live by their rules, especially with regard to weddings that are a personal affair," Sikh businessman Bhupinder "Shahji" Singh declared angrily.
But social activists said Sarna's edict had some justification.
The Sikhs' home state of Punjab, north of Delhi, has only 793 girls per 1,000 boys, the lowest such ratio in the country, as many female foetuses are aborted following ultrasound tests proscribed by law for several years.
These shrinking numbers in some Punjab villages dominated by the agricultural Jat community - also known for their chauvinism - have dropped to as low as 550 girls for every 1,000 males and the disparity is growing.
India's national average according to the 2001 census stood at 933 females for every 1,000 males.
According to the UK medical journal the Lancet, about 10 million female foetuses have been aborted in India over the past two decades resulting in this skewed ratio between men and women that is alarming demographers.
Punjab's skewed sex ratio recently led the Akal Takht, Sikhism's supreme religious and temporal seat in their holy city of Amritsar, to issue an edict banning female foeticide.
Priests organised conclaves that were sparsely attended at Sikh temples across Punjab where Voluntary Health Association activists alerted congregations to the dangers of the state's decreasing female population, but to minimal effect.
"Punjab's intensely patriarchal social structure has, for many generations, supported a distinct gender bias against women," Rainuka Dagar, of the Institute for Development and Communication in the state capital Chandigarhm, said.
"Most people are either ignorant of the existence of laws enacted eight years ago banning female foeticide or are openly abusive of them."
