little girls missing - But Where Are The Big Ones?

~Arundhati

It is not like I have never heard about infanticide. I have heard about it, read about it, passed an opinion about it. From the college hangouts to the lunchrooms at the office, I have talked about it at length over the years and with much passion. But what have I done about it? Nothing!

Welcome to the comfortable citadel of the quintessential NRI who has an opinion about everything, especially the "backwardness" of the "back home", but never finds enough time or Dollars to make a difference.

I am one of those big little girls who was not thrown in the trash or dunked in milk when I was born. I was actually loved, allowed to live, to thrive, to be educated, to be financially independent and to live in the world with my head held high because I am the woman of the future. But then, my kind live on a fragile island of comfort and believe this is all that is there to the world. Everything else is remote and distant, to be turned on and off at our convenience, just like the movies.

But something changed in me after I read Poonam's post. A friend sent me the link to Komal's post which came around the same time. The fatuousness with which I was looking at the world, was obliterated in a matter of seconds. Looking at all that information I shuddered. The enormity of it, the beastility of it made me hold my breath.

Genocide? Indeed! Is there anything that can me more brutal, more cowardly, more cold bloodedly organized, more unjust and yet more accepted than this? The images in Komal's post have been haunting me for days. Here I am, waiting for a child, any child, to bless my life and there are people in the world who are crushing, wasting, insulting this precious God given gift so callously! Can human paradoxes really surpass the paradox of Nature?

Then, suddenly, I realized that this act of killing a girl child is, in fact, just one manifestation of a many headed monster. It is just another way of expressing the lack of respect for women and the commoditization of the feminine. In the lower classes and the uneducated, this manifests itself in more brutal forms, in the so called higher classes, it manifests itself in more subtle, more pretensious forms.

When a girl gets married she is blessed saying, "May you have eight sons!" . Whenever someone asks me about having children, the 'well meaningly' advice me that, if I could somehow have just 'one' boy, that is 'enough'! As if after this long wait, I would be emancipated only if I have a male child. A family is supposed to be 'incomplete' without a boy. A husband does not stand by his wife in her life decisions. An NRI groom, shamelessly, demands a dowry for getting married to a girl. The physical, mental, sexual abuse of women in their families is a rampant even amongst the educated and the wealthy.

We see all these things happening in different shades, in different intensities, all around us in different contexts, but never think about them as one cohesive problem. We either seek a symptomatic relief for each of the problems or just plain ignore them. We create islands of comfort for ourselves, just so that our so called principles and practices are not threatened. We have a justification for everything. From religion to economics to the laws of karma, we use anything and everything to explain away the problems. We are not willing to admit that our society is rotten to the core, and that we need to go within us and seriously re-examine our values, otherwise, our society and our sanity will crumble and disappear without a trace.

Empowerment of women is not a distant ideal but it is absolutely critical for our survival as a human race. We cannot possibly expect to have a healthy, sustainable society with half of it's members living under dread and suppression. I am not a feminist in the much abused sense of the term. I don't propose the equality of sexes in anything and everything. Each gender has its own set of strengths and its own set of weaknesses. What I demand is equal respect for both, and an environment where both the genders can thrive in their own special way, without fear of suppression or suspicion about each other.

The Man and the Woman are made to complement each other in a way as to create a complete being. One without the other is incomplete, empty, stunted.

All the women and also the men who are reading this, I urge you, for once, look deep into yourselves. If you find even a shred of disrespect towards the opposite sex, please, please purge yourselves of it. It is a small step that we take on the "inside" that will change our environment for the future. We are all small people, but we have a great will that aligns to the collective will of the divine. Please channalize it to what is pure, what is just and what Nature intended us to do.

You may, perhaps, never see it, but rest assured, that your powerful will just saved the life of a young girl, who might have been killed otherwise.

little girls missing

after the minor fiasco on this page and the subsequent deletion of 2 posts, there was an urgent need to move on, to put up another post fast. and to do that, for some odd reason, we froze on female infanticide as the next topic. talking about this cause is never an easy task. i have gone through the pains (if i may) one time too many.

a year and a half ago, in a 5 pager review to my 2 long copy ads on female infanticide, a veteran ad writer/author based in UK, narrated this incident to me on mail.

“there was a particularly cruel experiment done once with monkeys, where a mother monkey and her baby were placed in a cage with a metal floor which was progressively heated. for a long time the mother monkey suffered the pain in her feet, but when the floor became so hot as to sear her feet she threw the baby on the floor and stood on it.”

what parents do to their own little girls in this country is equally unpalatable. here’s an excerpt from one of my ads, to give you an idea:

take a bath towel, dip it in a bucket full of cold water, bring it out, don't wring it, place it on the floor, bring a newborn baby girl, lay her down on the towel and wrap her in it. wait for a few minutes until she catches pneumonia and then don't treat it. result: death. for faster results, drown the baby in a pot of milk, or stuff her in a clay pot. you can even feed her grains of paddy husk, cooking salt or tobacco. when none of these are available, just hold the baby from the waist and shake her back and forth until the spinal cord snaps. she won’t have so much of chance to let out even a faint cry.

salt, tobacco, pot of milk, wet cold towel…household stuff or weaponry? think about it.

when i was researching on the cause, beside the staggering statistics, what alarmed me more was how these methods and codes (which i will talk about further in this para) traversed the length and the breadth of the country, merely on hushed whispers.
that squeezing the milky sap from an oleander shrub and mixing it with castor oil can produce poison, lethal enough to kill a newborn is common knowledge, possibly in more states than you and i know of.
that when a pregnant couple go to a doctor for an ultrasound test, the doc reveals (illegal) the sex of the baby by asking them to buy either pink clothes (which means a girl) or blue (which means a boy). or treat yourself to ladoos (girl), barfi (boy). the couple then leave the clinic only after they have reserved an appointment for a (sex selective) abortion. these methods and codes are common knowledge despite the fact they were never published, no one set them in any book as a rule, they weren’t even popular references, until now.

excerpt 2:
for centuries, dating as far back as the vedic era, the evil of female infanticide has been surreptitiously but effectively eroding the sense of humanity in parents and family patriarchs. the preference of a son over a daughter is so overbearing, even the frail body of their own just born daughter evokes contempt in the parents.

no wonder, UN states 50 million, read again 50 million girls have gone missing. that figure is more than the one of the biggest genocides in history, holocaust which is generally reckoned at six million jews.

on the other hand, the figure will not come as a surprise if you consider the number of the decades that have gone into it. but what will surprise is that this practice has been under wraps for such a long time. now what else can it be, if not a nationwide coup against the girl child. how many, really how many families are involved?

excerpt 3:
a daughter is considered an economic liability because of the heavy dowry demanded by the groom's family at the time of marriage. on the other hand, the birth of a son is perceived as an opportunity for upward mobility. sons are expected to support their parents in old age and are therefore viewed as a source of social security.

now consider this. there are reports on how in the affluent haryana, parents buy brides for their sons from neighbouring villages, some even from far-off states for a price, termed as dowry. this is a powerful irony, almost poetic, according to the senior who reviewed my ads. i concur.

excerpt 4:
the most adverse effect of this carnage can be seen in child sex ratios. the ideal child sex ratio is 1000 or more girls per 1000 boys. in 1991, it was an alarming 945 girls per 1000 boys. in 2001, it got worse. just 927 girls per 1000 boys. haryana has the lowest sex ratio in the country at 875 females per 1,000 males. neighbouring punjab stands closer at 882.

there are no reports yet, but there is caution about how men in these places where there is an acute scarcity of women, will turn to bestiality eventually. and if that begins to happen, if it has not already, we will hear of strange, alien diseases unknown to mankind before.

excerpt 5:
go to the farthest villages in rajasthan, up, maharashtra, haryana, punjab, gujarat, even bihar, you may not find clean drinking water but there is good chance you’d find a doctor wielding the latest technology that enables sex selective abortion. not only this, you’d find him advertising his services too. often as blatantly as ‘pay rs 500 now and save rs 50,000 (to be given as dowry to the daughter) later’.
in 1994, the indian government passed a bill banning the misuse of pre-natal diagnostic techniques. the directive permitted the doctors to use the equipment only to check on the unborn’s condition, not to check or reveal its sex. the bill is far from being implemented even today, 10 years later.

beside the doctors and the parents, there are local dais in villages who execute the job pretty well.

excerpt 6:
the less brutal of them pay the old midwives, called dais in local lingo, to get rid of the babies for a fee that ranges from rs 60-rs 150. the girls, who survive, often not for the love of their parents, are denied adequate nutrition. inadequate breast feeding and early weaning; insufficient or delayed medical care; lack of attention and emotional deprivation are just a few ways to ensure the girl dies a natural death in less than 6 years.

with this, i am done with the info bit of the post. am exhausted yet again and pretty much tongue-tied too. the whys of it all continue to escape me. dowry and son preference are cited to be the main reasons. i am not convinced. if dowry is one of the reasons then how does one explain pregnant NRI couples coming to india, getting to know the sex of the foetus, aborting it if it’s a girl and then back to where they came from. dowry should be the least of issues on their mind.
or how do you explain the imbalance in the sex ratio in bombay amongst the other cities. there is one doctor called dr malpani who runs a clinic in south bombay, is known to have made it big only by conducting sex selective abortions. google him if you want more info.
the ngo i volunteer with, played a role in getting to him but he is free and practicing even today, from what i know. infact, the ngo also filed a second PIL (the first one was filed sometime in the early 90s) in the supreme court in february 2000 to put the issue of sex determination and sex preselection on the national agenda.

if not dowry, is son preference such a strong motive. how cruel is it to prefer one child over the other, merely on basis of gender.
and isn’t it heartbreaking to know that for parents to stop killing their own daughters, we need PILs and laws.

it would be unrealistic to think that this practice can be eradiated completely, containing it is definitely possible. it needs a well-organised national campaign, no less. but one can make a small beginning atleast. if any one has ideas, i can introduce you to the right people. if not that, just talk about it, be angry about it, be concerned. that'll be something.

~ poonam