KALPANA SHARMA
As India turns 60, we have to ask ourselves whether we have deliberately chosen to ignore reality.
Just a fortnight before India turns 60 — an age that is supposed to signify maturity and respectability — a front page newspaper headline hammered in another reality. “Bigamous man tortures spouses for male offspring,” stated the headline of a story on page one of The Telegraph on July 29, 2007. “Six abortions, all for a son,” read the strap.
Not an auspicious way to mark 60 years of Independence if our society continues to be a slave to son preference. Something has to change. But it hasn’t happened yet. Not by a long shot.
Laws don’t matter
The story referred to above was about two women married to one man in Padra, near Vadodara in Gujarat. Bigamy is illegal. And so is sex selective abortion. In Padra, however, none of this mattered. Rajesh first married Sunita, who is now 27 years old. In nine years of marriage, she has been forced to have six abortions because after the first child, a girl, Rajesh insisted he wanted a boy. So every time she became pregnant, she had to find out whether she was going to have a boy or a girl. If it was a girl, then she had no choice but to abort. Except once, when it was too late to abort, and she delivered another girl. Today, seven months into her ninth pregnancy, she says she refused to have another abortion and survived her husband kicking her to induce an abortion.
The second wife, 22-year-old Kajal, had just given birth to a baby girl. She says that when her child was delivered, Rajesh held the infant upside down and said, “I didn’t marry you to produce girls”. She had to beg him not to kill the child.
At the end of July, these two women decided to escape their torturer. They sneaked out of the house with the three girls. Luckily for them, they found an auto-rickshaw driver who knew of a women’s shelter. He took them there. The women running the centre say that Sunita and Kajal were so traumatised, they could not speak for several days. Now they have finally told their story and a case has been filed against Rajesh. The two women, one presumes, will be rehabilitated and the three girls, as well as the child Sunita is soon to deliver, can now look forward to a better future.
Another depressing tale
In the same month of July, we read the macabre and depressing tale of the female foetuses found near Nayagarh, around 100 km from Orissa’s capital of Bhubaneshwar. The bag containing the foetuses was discovered by chance by a rag picker. As a result, the whole sordid tale of sex selection was exposed, including the involvement of a doctor attached to a government hospital and his wife. Together they ran the business of aborting female foetuses. The doctors have been caught. But the story does not end there. Nayagarh has the lowest sex ratio of any district in Orissa. Fortunately, this chance discovery has alerted people to the possibility of a far more widespread practice of sex selective abortions in many other parts of the State.
Similar stories continue to surface from different States — the latest from Buldhana district in Maharashtra and from Bangalore in Karnataka. No State seems immune except perhaps some of the States in India’s Northeast. In Meghalaya’s once-beautiful capital city of Shillong, now over-run by Maruti taxis and buses and trucks spewing noxious diesel fumes, a large board informs the local residents about the law banning sex determination tests. Khasis don’t need to be told the value of a girl. Girls are important as property passes on through the female line. But then Meghalaya now has a substantial number of non-Khasis. So perhaps the message on that hoarding is needed even in Shillong.
Yet, as has been argued before on innumerable occasions, the existence of a law in India seems to make little difference to the situation on the ground. For decades, women’s groups, the government, district authorities and others have been campaigning for the “girl child” and spreading information about the illegality of sex selective abortions. Yet, like the doctors in Orissa, the message has not been taken seriously. Perhaps the law is beginning to have an effect in the metros where local authorities are making a concerted effort to check on the registration of all ultra sonography machines. But step outside the State capitals, and you find many more stories like the ones narrated by Sunita and Kajal.
At a time when we measure the quality of justice on the basis of a Bollywood star being sentenced for an acknowledged misdemeanor, and the media continues to obsess about Sanjay Dutt, how he feels, what he eats, how he sleeps in Yeravada jail even as thousands of undertrials rot in our jails for years, even decades, without anyone hearing about them leave alone worrying about the conditions under which they survive, we have to ask ourselves whether we have deliberately chosen to ignore reality. Growing older should not mean becoming blind, even if myopia is a physical condition that sometimes increases with age.
Unwritten histories
Stories like those of Sunita and Kajal inevitably float to the top, despite the media’s concentrated focus on the rich and the famous. But only the most dramatic and sensational ones catch media attention. If Sunita and Kajal had not managed to escape and find a women’s shelter, their story would also have never surfaced. It would be one of the scores of such stories that never get told, which remain a part of our unwritten histories.
Email the writer: >sharma.kalpana@yahoo.com