Rushdie speaks for 'missing girls'

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON, MAY 6. Controversial novelist Salman Rushdie, whose love- hate relationship with India has meant that he is never too detached from it, has joined the debate on the ``scandal of the missing girls'' - the demographic imbalance threatening India because of its obsessive preference for boys - and he has attacked Indian women for colluding with men in this.

He has warned women to ``beware of women'' who are inadvertently collaborating to turn them into ``an endangered species'' by agreeing to ``sex-discriminatory abortions'' to avoid having a girl child. The story of women being their own worst enemies, he suggests, is ``an old story, given a chilling new gynaecological twist'' here. In the new plot, tens of hundreds of Indian women are offering themselves to sex determination tests and then ridding themselves of the foetus if it happens to be female. ``What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female foetuses?'', Rushdie asks in an article in The Guardian weekend review.

It is both an angry and anguished Rushdie who lashes out at the Indian society for allowing such prejudices even as ``the nation imagines itself as a woman - Bharat Mata, Mother India - and even though, in Hinduism, the dynamic principle of the godhead, Shakti, is female...'' The article is illustrated with a photograph of a Hindu goddess with the caption, ``The powerful Hindu god is female...but prejudice prevails.''

Rushdie condemns the illegal ultrasound tests to determine the sex of the unborn child, and the ``obscene quantities of healthy female foetuses'' which are then destroyed because parents - mothers as well as fathers - want a male child. ``Many Indian commentators say that if these sex- discriminatory abortions are to end, the refusals must come from Indian women.

But Indian women seem to want male children as much as their husbands do'', he says, pointing out that though partly this is because of the pressures of a male-centred society, ``fundamentally it's the result of modern technology placed at the service of medieval social attitudes.''

He says it disturbs him to see what is going on in India, coming, as he does, from a sprawling Indian family dominated by women. He has no brother but ``plenty of sisters (three: believe me, that's plenty'') and he grew up in a household full of strong, opinionated women who were so loud and voluble that to be heard in their company you needed a strong voice, and even a stronger argument. ``If you aren't worth listening to, you will most certainly not be heard.'' That was the ambience in which he grew up, and that's why, he says, his women characters are more ``flamboyant'' than male characters.

A pity, then, that they are threatened with extinction in India. Is India, he asks, willing to be seen as the country that ``gets rid of its daughters because it believes them inferior to men?'' And have the girl-hating parents ever thought what they would say to their sons when - one day - they ask them:``Where are my sisters?'' What will they answer them? Rushdie wonders.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : International
Previous : Longer nights for pub crawlers in U.K.
Next     : Sattar may visit U.S. soon