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