Gifts, Greed, and the Law: How India Actually Punishes Dowry Today

"It's just a gift from the family." It's a phrase that has covered a multitude of sins in Indian weddings — cash, cars, jewellery, furniture, sometimes entire flats, all exchanged under the polite fiction of affection rather than obligation. Everyone in the room usually knows the difference. The law has spent over sixty years trying to know it too.

Dowry was banned in India in 1961. Fast forward to 2026, and it is still one of the most quietly persistent practices in Indian marriages — and also one of the most heavily re-legislated. With the criminal code itself rewritten in 2024, the rules around dowry harassment and dowry death look different than they did even a few years ago. Does this mean the problem is solved? Not even close. It simply means the law keeps trying new tools on an old wound.

A Ban That Arrived Before the Practice Left

The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 was meant to end dowry outright. It defines dowry broadly — any property or valuable security given or agreed to be given by one party to a marriage to the other, in connection with the marriage — and makes giving, taking, or even demanding it a punishable offence. Genuine gifts, given without any condition attached, fall outside the definition; the coerced kind does not.

More than six decades later, the Act is still on the books, largely unchanged, still doing the basic work of criminalising the transaction itself. What has changed dramatically is everything built around it — the criminal provisions that deal with what happens when a dowry demand turns into harassment, cruelty, or worse.

New Code, Same Fight: From IPC to BNS

On 1 July 2024, India replaced its colonial-era criminal code, the Indian Penal Code, with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023. Dowry-related offences didn't disappear in the transition — they moved.

Section 498A of the old IPC, the provision that criminalised cruelty by a husband or his relatives, is now **Section 85 of the BNS**. It still covers the same two situations: conduct likely to drive a woman to suicide or cause grave injury, and harassment aimed at coercing her or her family into meeting an unlawful demand — dowry being the textbook example. A related provision, **Section 86**, now separately defines what "cruelty" actually means, something the old IPC folded into the same section.

Section 304B, the offence of dowry death, is now **Section 80 of the BNS**. The definition hasn't softened: if a woman dies from burns, bodily injury, or otherwise unnatural causes within seven years of marriage, and it's shown that she was subjected to cruelty or harassment for dowry shortly before her death, the law treats her husband or his relatives as having caused that death. The punishment remains severe — a minimum of seven years, extending to life imprisonment. The evidentiary backbone behind that offence has moved too.

The Indian Evidence Act's Section 113B, which let courts presume guilt once cruelty and an unnatural death within seven years were shown, is now **Section 118 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023**. In effect, once the prosecution proves recent dowry-related harassment and an unnatural death within the statutory window, the burden flips — it's now on the accused to explain why he shouldn't be presumed responsible.

None of this is a softer law. It's the same law, renumbered and, in places, sharpened

The Section Everyone Argues About :

If there is one dowry-related provision that generates as much controversy as protection, it's Section 85 BNS — the reborn 498A. For decades, it has been simultaneously credited with giving harassed women a real criminal remedy and blamed for enabling vague, sweeping complaints against entire families.

The numbers from recent years back up both sides of that argument. RTI data from Delhi's district courts showed that out of nearly 10,000 Section 85/498A trials between 2021 and 2024, only a fraction ended in conviction, while a much larger share were quashed or resulted in acquittal. That gap between complaints filed and convictions secured is exactly why this provision keeps landing back in front of the Supreme Court.

The Courts Draw Some Lines

Recent Supreme Court decisions have tried to walk a narrow path — preserving the law's protective purpose while reining in its use as a blunt instrument against extended family.

In **Dara Lakshmi Narayana v. State of Bihar (2025)**, the Court cautioned against the indiscriminate implication of family members in matrimonial disputes, insisting that courts scrutinise such complaints with care rather than accept them at face value. In **Dechamma v. State of Karnataka (2024)**, the Court clarified that the term "relative" under the cruelty provision means a relationship recognised by blood, marriage, or adoption — not a romantic partner outside marriage. And in **Rajesh Chaddha v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2025)**, decided after a trial that had dragged on for two decades, the Court acquitted a man convicted under the old 498A and the Dowry Prohibition Act, holding that vague, unsubstantiated allegations cannot sustain a criminal conviction.

Perhaps the most structurally significant recent development is **Shivangi Bansal v. Sahib Bansal (2025)**, where the Supreme Court used its constitutional powers to impose nationwide procedural safeguards: mandatory referral of cruelty complaints to neutral Family Welfare Committees, a two-month cooling-off period before arrest in most cases, and a rule against automatic arrest for offences carrying sentences under seven years. Cases involving serious charges like dowry death are carved out of this cooling-off process entirely — the safeguard is aimed at reducing hasty arrests in cruelty complaints, not at slowing down the response to a death.

And when petitioners asked the Court in **Janshruti v. Union of India (2025)** to declare the cruelty provision unconstitutional or demand gender-neutral legislation, the Court declined, holding that the provision was created to address a deeply entrenched social practice and that Parliament's continued retention of it, decades on, reflects a considered judgment that the underlying problem hasn't gone away.

Protection and Restraint, Side by Side 

These recent rulings tell a story that looks a lot like the pattern in other areas of Indian family law: the courts are not walking back the protective purpose of dowry law, but they are actively policing its edges. A woman genuinely harassed for dowry still has one of the strongest evidentiary presumptions in Indian criminal law working in her favour, especially where death is involved. A distant relative swept into a complaint on vague, general language has an increasingly receptive Court willing to intervene.

That balance is deliberate, not accidental. The Supreme Court has been explicit that it is not diluting the seriousness of dowry offences — only insisting that the process used to prosecute them stays fair to everyone named in a complaint.

The Part the Law Can't Fully Reach

Renumbering statutes and tightening procedure doesn't, by itself, change what happens inside a family before anyone ever files a complaint. Dowry demands often begin quietly — a suggestion here, an expectation there — long before they escalate into the kind of documented cruelty a court can act on. By the time a case reaches a magistrate, the harm has frequently already been done.

This is the gap that no BNS section, however well drafted, can close on its own: the cultural expectation that a marriage still comes with a price tag, paid by the bride's family, negotiated in whispers rather than contracts.

So... Has the Law Actually Changed Anything?

In structure, yes, considerably. What used to be Section 498A and Section 304B of a colonial-era code is now Section 85 and Section 80 of a homegrown one, backed by an evidentiary presumption that has survived the transition from the Evidence Act to the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam intact. The punishments haven't softened. The presumption against the accused in a dowry death case hasn't weakened. If anything, courts are working harder to make sure the law hits its intended targets more precisely.

What hasn't changed is the deeper question the numbers keep raising: a law can be renamed, renumbered, and refined for sixty-five years, but it can only punish dowry after the fact. It cannot, by itself, make a family stop asking for it in the first place.

References

1. The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, Sections 2, 3, and 4.

2. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, Section 80 (dowry death, formerly Section 304B, Indian Penal Code, 1860).

3. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, Sections 85 and 86 (cruelty by husband or relatives, formerly Section 498A, Indian Penal Code, 1860).

4. The Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, Section 118 (presumption as to dowry death, formerly Section 113B, Indian Evidence Act, 1872).

5. Dara Lakshmi Narayana v. State of Bihar, (2025) 3 SCC 735 (Supreme Court of India).

6. Dechamma I.M. @ Dechamma Koushik v. State of Karnataka, 2024 (Supreme Court of India).

7. Rajesh Chaddha v. State of Uttar Pradesh, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 1094 / 2025 INSC 671 (Supreme Court of India), decided 13 May 2025.

8. Shivangi Bansal v. Sahib Bansal, 2025 (Supreme Court of India), decided under Article 142 of the constitution

9. Janshruti v. Union of India, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 909 (Supreme Court of India).

10. RTI data on Section 85 BNS / Section 498A IPC trial outcomes, five Delhi district courts, 2021–2024, as reported by LiveLaw. 

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