Justice Is All We Want #missiondesi

Female Infanticide : Born to Die - 2

There was only one way out of a lifetime burden of bringing up two daughters. And Kuppusamy decided on what they had to do. That evening he trudged - somewhat unsteadily - into a nearby field, plucked a handful of oleander berries that are known for their lethal poison, and returned home. Chinnammal mashed them into a milky paste and fed her crying infant with the substance. The parents then shut the small door of their hut, sat outside, and waited for the poison to do its work.

Within an hour the baby began to twitch and tremble fitfully. Slowly she started spouting blood through her mouth and nose. The parents heard her whining. A few more minutes, and all was quiet. Chinnammal knew that everything was over. She quietly walked over to her mother's hut close by, dug up a little patch of ground inside, brought and buried the dead baby.

"I killed my child to save it from the lifelong ignominy of being the daughter of a poor family that cannot afford to pay a decent dowry," Chinnammal said, as she sipped water to keep her voice from breaking. "But all the same, it was extremely difficult to steel myself for the act. A mother who has borne a child cannot bear to see it suffer even for a little while, let alone bring herself to kill it. But I had to do it, because my husband and I concluded that it was better to let our child suffer an hour or two and die than suffer throughout life."

Kuppusamy, at first reluctant to talk, admitted later during an interview: "I get Rs 13 a day as agricultural wages, on the days that I manage to find work. My wife gets Rs 6 a day. I cannot dream of decently marrying off two daughters. Killing girl babies due to fear of the dowry problem is very common in our Kallar community."

India Today's investigations reveal that over the last 10 to 15 years, female infanticide has come to be increasingly accepted among Madurai district's Kallars (a 2-lakh strong martial sub-caste) as the only way out of the dowry problem. Said S. Muthuramalingam, who has a small farm in Paraipatti village: "The practice has grown among the Kallars during the last 10 years, and has become very widespread after 1980."

The Kallar group of Madurai district is concentrated in Usilampatti taluk and its 300 villages, and accounts for nearly 80 per cent of the taluk's 2.65 lakh population. In a damning confession, Muniamma of Ayodhyapatti village, an agricultural worker, said after some prodding: "There is hardly a poor Kallar family in which a female baby has not been murdered some time or the other during the last 10 years."

Chinnammal was not the only Kallar mother who administered poison to her baby daughter last month. Twenty-five-year-old Chinnakkal of Echampatti village, the wife of a counter clerk, Gopal, in the village cinema theatre, delivered her second baby daughter in the wee hours of May 10 in the Usilampatti government hospital.

The mother escaped from the hospital with the new-born baby an hour after childbirth, flouting normal medical advice that a mother should rest a few days in hospital after delivery before getting discharged. Chinnakkal wanted to escape and kill the baby. The entries in the hospital records showed that the mother and daughter had absconded.

But Chinnakkal reported back to the hospital after a week, not with the baby but with her own mother. She came to consult the gynaecologist, Dr Suthanthiradevi, because her breast milk had clotted. The clotting occurred because there was no baby to breast-feed. When asked by the doctors what had happened to her baby, Chinnakkal explained: "The little one died within four days of birth due to fits and fever." Why hadn't she rushed the baby to the hospital? The answer was barely audible: "I couldn't afford to do that."

Later, under persistent questioning, Chinnakkal gradually revealed the tragic truth: "How can I afford to bring up two daughters in these difficult days?" she asked. "We are a very poor family. Even to bring up my first daughter is going to be an unbearable burden. My husband has not come to see me after I gave birth to my second female child. He must have hated me after knowing it is another daughter. I should let him know that I have done away with the baby."

Dr Suthanthiradevi said that Chinnakkal and Chinnammal are not exceptions but very much the rule in the Kallar community. She has been practising in Usilampatti for over five years and disclosed that, on an average, 1,200 delivery cases come to the hospital every year. Of these, nearly half deliver female babies. Said Suthanthiradevi: "Over 95 percent of the women who give birth to daughters abscond immediately after the babies are born, and we have recorded this in our registers. We can come to our own conclusions about the motive for absconding."

The statistics are shocking. Nearly 600 female births in the Kallar group are recorded in the Usilampatti government hospital every year, and out of these an estimated 570 babies vanish with their mothers no sooner than they can open their eyes to the world. Hospital sources estimate that nearly 80 per cent of these vanishing babies - more than 450 - become victims of infanticide.

Besides this, deliveries also occur in primary health centres and in the private nursing homes and maternity hospitals that have mushroomed in the taluk, for which no comprehensive records are available, not to speak of the child births in the village households. Some 20-odd private nursing homes, which admit maternity cases also, have come up in Usilampatti town alone. Said Dr Sugandhi Natarajan, who runs one of these private nursing homes: "We get about 12 to 15 delivery cases a year even in our small nursing home, and roughly seven of them deliver female children.

Almost all of them run away immediately after childbirth, and come to consult us again after a week or 10 days because they invariably have this problem of breast-milk clotting, which has to be corrected with hormone tablets. The female babies inevitably die, and we know how they die. It is very sad but it keeps happening. I have been practising here for five to six years and what happens to female babies is common knowledge in these parts."

To Be continued.

Please vote and comment