Justice Is All We Want #missiondesi

Female Infanticide : Born to Die - 1

A woman should be a lump of clay.
The luckless man loses a horse; the lucky man loses a wife.
Be the mother of a hunched sons.

These proverbs - from Bengal, Punjab, Maharashtra - are still a part of the living folklore which infuses the social customs that dictate the lives of millions of Indians in towns and villages across the country. They are a grim reminder that even in the 20th century - an age in which most of the modem world is awakening to the call of enlightened feminism - India still wallows In the primordial slime of misogyny: man's inhumanity to woman.

In most parts of the country, a woman is still considered a burdensome appendage. She is an economic drain. She must be exploited or dispensed' with as a non-person. Because she crushes her family with marriage and dowry expenses she must be raised - from childhood - in financial and physical neglect Her birth, in many parts of the country is greeted with silence, even sorrow. A boy arrives to the sound of joyous conch shells. Discrimination begins at birth.

Comprehensive studies conducted by UNICEF as well as Indian social scientists reveal an organized pattern of discrimination against young girls and older women in India. Their revelations are startling.

India is the only country in the world where the ratio of women to men has been declining over the years. The sex ratio declined from 972 females per 1,000 males in 1901 to 935 in 1981. And India is one of a handful of countries where female infant mortality exceeds that of the male-notwithstanding the fact that the female child is biologically stronger at birth.

Girl babies are breast-fed less frequently, and for a shorter duration than boy babies. When they grow up, they are provided less nutrition than their brothers. A recent survey of infants, toddlers and preschoolers showed that within their combined age groups, 71 per cent of females suffered from severe malnutrition, as against 28 per cent of the males.

A related statistic reveals that boys are taken to hospital for treatment of common diseases in twice the number as girls. Boys do not fall ill more frequently than girls, they are merely provided more health care by parents who value sons more than daughters. In the widening gender gap in India the female literacy rate - 24.88 per cent - is barely half that of males - 46.74 per cent. And the gap continues to widen. In the 6-14 age group, nearly 84 per cent of boys are enrolled in schools, as against 54 per cent in the case of girls.

The plight of India's girls aged 15 and under - about 140 million of them - cries out desperately for caring and sensitive attention. They form 20 per cent of the nation's population but are denied adequate food and care because their parents are themselves the victims and prisoners of brutal tradition and economic circumstance in which the female shoulders a horrifying responsibility.

For her sins, she is burned as an adult bride over dowry demands or, if she is a child bride, condemned to a lifetime of penurious widowhood upon the death of a husband even before her marriage is consummated.

If young girls and older women are denied a living in most parts of India, it is only the next step of this cruel logic that they should be denied life itself. Female infanticide - snuffing out the lives of newborn babes - is ultimately, the catharsis in the tragic drama of female life in this country. The cover story which follows is a graphic and chilling account of the trials and tribulations of families that kill their female infants.

It focuses on the Kallars - a community of landless labourers in Tamil Nadu's Madurai district. It may be happening in one state, in one community, but it is a mirror in which all Indians must look and come face to face with the ugliness that surrounds them. The challenge of developing India into a land of social and economic justice, as Nehru put it, is not just the creation of factories, and machinery and grandiose schemes. "Ultimately," he said, "it is the human being that counts, and if the human being counts, well, he counts more as a child than a grown-up."

Normally, the day should have been one of great rejoicing for 35-year-old Kuppusamy and his 26-year-old wife Chinnammal, both agricultural workers in Chulive-chanpatti village in the Usilampatti taluk of Madurai district. It was a May morning of sparkling sunshine and Chinnammal, attractive and slim despite her pregnancy, was in labour inside her mud-and-thatch hut. In a few minutes her second child would be born. Her first, daughter Chellammal, 3, played outside.

The new-born cried lustily as it came into this world. It was a bonny child, fair of complexion, its eyes squinting at the sunlight that filtered in. But when the mother laid eyes on her baby, tears welled up in her eyes. They were not tears of joy.

Chinnammal had seen the sex of the child: a girl. What crossed her mind was not the anticipation of the joys of motherhood but the trials that lay ahead. How could a family of daily-wage agricultural workers belonging to the Kallar group of the Thevar community afford to bring up and marry off two daughters?

"A mother who has borne a child cannot bear to see it suffer even a little, let alone bring herself to kill it. But I had to do it. We concluded it was better to let her suffer an hour, or two hours and die than let her suffer throughout life."
Chinnamal

How could they, when the dowry demanded by bridegrooms was always astronomical? The couple had decided to have a second child only in the desperate hope that it would be a boy. But on this sunny day, the dream lay shattered.

To be continued.

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