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Though invited to address the seminar, which was jointly organized by the Hindu reformer Swami Agnivesh and the International Society Against Dowry and Bride Burning in India, Chatterji could not attend the seminar as she was travelling. However she told ENI she agreed "100 percent" with the declaration criticizing religions.

"Religions have created the mindset for the dowry abuse—without ever raising the issue of equality of human beings," Swami Agnivesh said at the conclusion of the seminar, which was attended by 70 delegates from India and abroad. Agnivesh is also chairperson of the United Nations' Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. "Organized religions—as they are practiced now—only aggravate the problem. There is a whole mindset behind the dowry system and the violence attached to it," said Swami Agnivesh.

He quoted discriminatory passages from Hindu scriptures, including one that states that a father can only attain "moksha"—salvation—if his son performs the last rites for him.

In an interview with ENI, Swami Agnivesh said that, because of this preference for male children, girls had been reduced to an "unwanted commodity to be disposed of in marriage with dowry."

Professor Himendra Takur, an academic from Harvard University and coordinator of the International Society Against Dowry, told the seminar that, according to a conservative estimate, more than 25,000 brides were burnt to death each year in India for their failure "to meet the dowry demands of their in-laws."

"We want to create a movement against this horrendous crime," Professor Takur said.

Matthew told ENI that churches were "doing little to end the dowry system" among Christians.

A member of the Orthodox church based in the state of Kerala, Matthew said that her church had the tradition of "pattaram"—collecting two percent of the dowry for the church. "The dowry amount used to be officially announced during the marriage ceremony," said Matthew. But since the Dowry Prohibition Act came into force in 1961 the practice had been stopped.

But she added that she had reason to believe that church trustees still collected pattaram in secret. "When my sister-in-law was married, they [the church] collected pattaram even from the girl's family."

Chatterji said she had got a "real taste of churches' patriarchal approach to the dowry problem" a decade ago when she coordinated the churches' bid to amend laws relating to Christian marriage, divorce, and adoption.

In her proposed amendments, Chatterji included a solemn declaration for the bridegroom and the bride containing the words "I have not asked for or given dowry" for the marriage.

However, almost all 33 members of the ecumenical committee of church leaders, lawyers, and canon law experts rejected the clause as "unnecessary."

Saldanha, who is also executive secretary of the women's desk of the Federation of Asian (Catholic) Bishops Conferences, told ENI that among Christians the dowry problem was "not as acute as among Hindus in so far as it does not end in cold murders."

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February (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45