Humankind could not possibly be so stupid, But humankind has been both, stupid and cruel. Over the years, all over India, the thirst for only male children has led countless expectant parents to kill their female foetuses in cold blood. Historically, the killing of newborn girls has been documented as far back as the 18th century, but it has become even more widespread, and insidious, with the killing of foetuses after determining their gender, in the supposedly enlightened 20th and 21st centuries.
Taken in isolation or in parts the numbers may not be overwhelming. But cumulatively, over the last 50 years, India has killed over 30 million of its girl babies, even before birth.
The immediate result of this – a drop in the child sex ratio which has gone from alarming to frightening. In the 0-6 age group, from a ratio of 1010 girls to every 1000 boys in 1941, the year 2011 saw a ratio of 914 girls to every 1000 boys.
The grim consequences
Stop to consider that each person wants a life partner. But when there are not enough women to match the number of men – what then? What happens to the 86 boys per thousand who are left without a corresponding female partner? The consequences, once the subject of creative visualisation by writers and filmmakers, are today a grim reality. By 2020 there will be 23 million men in the age group of 20-49, who will not find partners due to the deficit of women caused by female foeticide.
In an imagined, fanciful dimension, the woman would be treasured, revered and exalted. But in actuality, it is the opposite. The woman is completely devalued, and has every one of her rights taken away from her. She is treated as a commodity by her own family, her price is fixed by the male brokers who decide her fate. The practice of marriage is made into a farce.
A fate worse than death
The woman, far from being lucky to have survived and escaped foeticide or infanticide, ends up even more worse off: She is sold; shunted to another part of the country where the language and customs are strange to her, where she is often treated as an outcast and an alien; and, most horrible of all, she is “shared” between several men in the same household.
How did this horrific scenario come to happen? Historically, India has always looked upon children as wealth. The more children, the better, as they can help with the family work – agriculture or business – when they grow up. But historically India has also lurched under the burden of the dowry system, which itself has led to the gruesome deaths of innumerable young married women in their marital homes. Faced with the prospect of saving up and then spending lakhs for a daughter’s wedding, new parents seek a “solution” at birth itself – kill the baby if it is a girl. Among land-owning communities, another reason for killing the girl baby is the desire to keep the land within the family’s own sons, and not let a son-in-law lay claim to it. Sometimes, women themelves opt to abort rather than see their daughters suffer in a male-skewed world.
In the days when female infanticide was prevalent, there were different methods of killing newborn girls in different parts of the country. So institutionalised was the practice that it literally had its own traditions. Certain songs were sung when the baby was being smothered, or buried alive, or drowned. Often, the song tells her to go and send back a boy in her place. In Punjab, she is told to go, take gur (jaggery) and send it back with a brother. In that community, when a boy is born gur is distributed in the village.
Sitting targets in the womb
In the 1970s, technology enabled the killing to be done one step before birth. It became possible to determine the gender of the unborn baby at a stage when abortion was possible, and legal. Originally conceived as a government solution for terminating foetuses with severe medical problems, pre-natal testing also revealed the gender of the foetus. Parents, eager to avoid having a girl child, decided to terminate female foetuses. Doctors, seeing a lucrative business ahead, offered sex determination tests and abortions to willing parents. For a country struggling with a population explosion, this seemed like an easy answer to keeping the numbers down. The thinking was that in the desire for a male child, parents continue to have girl children till such time as a boy was not born. Terminating the pregnancy of a girl foetus would eliminate this aspect, it was felt.
Activists and authorities soon realised that what was happening was a systematic elimination of girls, and warnings began to be sounded about its dire consequences. After a partial ban in 1976, government hospitals and clinics no longer offered pre-natal testing, but the monster had been unleashed. The private sector had, literally, scented blood. The lure of money overrode any inhibitions some unscrupulous doctors may have had.Sex determination became even easier with the introduction of ultrasound technology in [the early 1990s]. This did away with the painful practice of amniocentesis and other dangerous methods. Sonography became a corner-shop service, offered in mobile vans and often as a “package” along with the subsequent abortion.
In the 1980s the drive against female foeticide and sex determination techniques gained strength. In 1982 the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS) launched the first campaign, in response to a pre-natal diagnostic clinic which was openly advertising its services, terming daughters as liabilities to the family and a threat to the nation, and encouraging expectant parents to rid themselves of the “danger”. More campaigns came up in different parts of the country, the move for an all-India ban on sex determination tests gained momentum, and the Pre Natal Diagnostic Tests (Regulation and Prohibition of Misuse) Act, 1994 (called the PNDT Act) came into force in January 1996.
Has the law helped?
Implementing the Act on the ground was another matter, however, and sex determination and female foeticide continued, practically unchecked. Following more protests and a public interest litigation by activists’ groups, the Supreme Court issued a directive in 2001 calling upon all state governments to strictly implement the law.
Nevertheless, sex determination continued clandestinely – as is reflected in a further anti-girl child skew in the child sex ratio from that year. In 2003, the PNDT Act was amended and renamed as the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994.Has it helped? Having read so far, cynical readers would imagine that it has not. And they would be right. Families routinely take pregnant women for “check-ups” which are actually sonographies; women are regularly either coerced and forced into abortion, or are given an anasethetic and upon waking find that their pregnancy has been terminated. All this naturally takes an awful toll on their physical and mental health.
Women who try to escape this nightmare don’t have it easy. The law may be on their side in letter, but the enforcers of the law are more often than not on the side of the perpetrators.
The combination of greed, social attitudes and practices, family pressure, lack of political will and lacunae in the law enforcement setup leads to heavy under-reporting of the crime, and a low conviction rate. In some cases, even when doctors are convicted, they are not imprisoned but released after paying a fine. When millions are killed in a relatively short span of time, it is termed genocide. India’s 30 million missing girls are not evoking the same kind of outrage, however, although female foeticide actually meets four out of five criteria to be termed genocide. In the case of female foeticide, the killing has happened before the girls came into this world. The killing has happened over several decades. But the fact remains that the killing has happened, and continues to happen. For this to change, attitudes towards women and girls must undergo a very fundamental transformation on a large scale.
0 comments:
Post a Comment