Fighting female infanticide

By Mythily Sivaraman

PANDIAMMA (NOT her real name), in her early Twenties, was devastated when her husband's family did not come to see her for ten days after her first baby girl was born. Pregnant a second time, she had nightmares that this time too, luck would pass her by. It did. Her husband visited her in her parental home, but her glimmer of hope receded when he maintained a stubborn silence; she longed for a single word of solace, a simple gesture of tenderness, in vain. A month later, with no sign of her husband wanting her back, she was caught one day with the dead baby, which the police alleged she had killed. Asked why she did it, she had said, child-like and bewildered: I do not know.

Pandiamma is not alone in her misery. Poovamma (all names changed) too - 40, with three daughters - is on trial for killing her female infant. ``We had to sell our land to cover legal costs. Coming out on bail itself cost a lot. Now back home, we have told our relatives and friends that the case has been dropped. Otherwise no one would have given their son in marriage to our daughter; and no loan for the wedding too.'' Asked what would happen if her appeal to the higher court failed, she said, ``then they better send my two girls too to jail with me. Else, who will look after them and who will give them in marriage? If this appeal fails, my family is doomed. Now we already have nothing to call our own.''

A tenant cultivator in her late Twenties, Kuppamma has two daughters and a son. The baby that she was accused of strangling was the third daughter. She and her husband were jailed along with their youngest child. That three baby girls born around the same time had died in that village had alerted the police. The father of one of the girls had told his wife: ``Why should I have anything to do with the legal proceedings when the baby died in your mother's house? I won't bear the expenses. It is your problem, not mine.'' Home on bail, the wife solved the problem by taking her own life.

Lakshmi was a 25-year-old habitually battered and bruised wife of a womaniser and extortionist. She spent time slogging in a mill to run the family and to pay off his loans. Always willing to give him one more chance, she had even antagonised her parents. On the day she delivered her second baby girl, he brutally assaulted her, killed the baby and disappeared from the scene. The wife was found with the baby poisoned to death. Shaken by the gruelling police interrogation, she naively believed her husband that if she accepted the crime he could get her released but if he was arrested she could not get him out; she confessed to the crime, but thereafter he never visited her in jail or outside. On bail, she is now at her parental home.

Not yet 20, Pazhaniamma, was charged with throwing her baby girl into a well. She had been taunted and abused for not producing a heir to the family; the only way she could satisfy family and social norms was to destroy the `non-heir' that she had produced. The press quoted the husband as saying he has welcomed the baby girl.

These are some of the 16 women presently charged with female infanticide - two of them appealing against death sentences - in Tamil Nadu. Six cases against men are also pending in courts. What lies at the root of this tragedy for these families? At an awareness camp for school children conducted by an NGO in an infanticide-prone area the children were asked who they preferred for a sibling - boy or girl. 99 per cent of them favoured boys; girls, they said, cost more to their parents. A 14-year-old schoolboy ran away from home when his parents refused to kill the twin girls born to them rather late in their life - he did not want to shoulder the responsibility of marrying them off later in life! Distressingly, such acute gender prejudice has not only not slackened to any significant extent in post independence India - excepting probably, in affluent urban families to some extent - but seems to have in fact been strengthened by the ethos of conspicuous consumption of the liberalisation era. The net result, it could be claimed, is that the woman gets punished twice over - once by depriving her the right to be born and to be alive and again by punishing her for killing her baby girl; as expected of her by community custom and also as an act of mercy to spare her daughter the agony and tears of her own life.

This raises several fundamental issues for reflection. Are these 16 women more sinned against than sinning? Are we punishing the victims of patriarchy rather than its perpetrators? Didn't they kill the female babies they had been taught to devalue from childhood, mainly to ensure their own survival in their marital homes? ``If the baby is a girl, don't come back'' is an injunction not to be taken lightly. Should not the state have launched a massive education campaign to publicise the basic biological reality that it is the chromosomes of the father, not the mother, that determine the sex of the baby? Given the reality that vast stretches of rural India still reel under patriarchy in its crudest forms, is it realistic to penalise its victims for not standing up to it? Whose fault is it that the woman, who labours more than the man, and subsists on much less, has come to be perceived as a liability?

The disastrous impact of the consumerist culture spawned by globalisation that has been a driving force in pushing up dowry rates and consuming brides in flames has been widely held to account by social scientists for the spread of infanticide to new areas and communities. They perceive the spread ``not as a relic of an atavistic past, but as consequence of a narrowly based, consumerist path of capitalist development within a framework of strong patriarchy and son preference, and an environment of universalisation of the small family norm...'' and suggest that ``policy intervention and social mobilisation are urgently needed on this issue''. (Venkatesh Athreya, Frontline, April 27, 2001). It is this insight that is seen lacking in a statement by the Tamil Nadu Minister for Social Welfare: ``infanticide should no more be treated as a social evil but be sternly dealt with as a criminal act''.

A perception held by a section of social activists is that as one strives to change state policy as a long-term goal, punishing those who kill their offsprings with a proprietorial right, could work as an effective deterrent in the short term. This has, in effect, opened the floodgates to foeticide, aided by modern scanning technologies. Another point of view that it is the father who should be arrested instead of the mother, as infanticide could not happen against his wish, was tested in a gathering of women in an affected area; some thought that it would ruin the marriage and would split the family. Many, including a large number of NGOs working in these areas are against any punitive action, and stress instead basic policy changes that would expedite attitudinal changes.

It would be naive to perceive female infanticide and foeticide solely as expressions of violence of the families concerned, ignoring the deceptively invisible violence that is inherent in the path of market-driven economic development and an acquisitive culture that creates and strengthens inequalities and inhumanities. Compassion, humaneness and the worth of the individual are totally alien values in an economic dispensation where greed is assiduously cultivated and individual profit is celebrated as the crowning civilisational goal and glory. It is about time we exerted ourselves to reflect and debate on who the major and minor players are in these killing fields and whether the women in distress should be penalised and made to bear a cross that belongs elsewhere.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Previous : Universal and free AIDS care
Next     : Speaking for the Govt.