‘A son is a son till he gets himself a wife. A daughter’s a daughter all her life.’ When will India realize this? Economic development and improving social indicators are meant to go hand in hand. India, however, has flouted this pattern when it comes to improving gender relations. Despite improving literacy, health, age at marriage and work participation, women are still second class citizens in this country.
Why do Indians do not want the girl child? This phenomenon is today being described as daughter dis-preference, the mirror-image of son-preference. There are answers, old and new, to explain why sons are still wanted more than daughters. Since daughters marry and go away, parents regard investment in them a waste. They see a double loss. The future gains from investment in a girl child will accrue to her spousal family and not to her parental family. Further, a large amount has to be spent on a dowry to marry her off. Under this economic logic, girls have already lost the battle of being valued.
This scenario is ensured by paralegal residence whereby the woman goes to live with the groom's family after marriage. As a consequence, she does not inherit land or get to look after the old parents, another reason given for favoring the boy. That the equation might be changing — with women being more available to look after old parents, especially in urban areas — has not made much of a dent in son-preference. Further, men have traditionally been given the ritual role of lighting the funeral pyre of the father and a son is essential for this. This ritual requirement is not quite balanced by the ritual need for a father to have a daughter that he can give away in kanyadaan.
Today, it is easier to eliminate the girl child. The technology of pre-natal detection of the sex of the fetus has made it easier to eliminate the girl child in the womb itself. It is probably ultra-sound technology and its widespread availability that can account for the continuing fall in the child sex ratio. Parents want small families but within the small family they want more boys than girls.
What are the implications of this decline? Several states, particularly, Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat, and several districts in other states, are already experiencing either state-wide or localized bride shortage. And this bride shortage (an instance of what demographers call the ‘marriage squeeze’) is only set to get worse. It has two major consequences; one that brides have to be ‘imported’ from elsewhere, often away from one's own cultural context, and two, lack of girls means an excess of bachelors. Punjab and Haryana, with a century-old low sex ratio, have for long resorted to importing wives from Bengal and other states.
It is the educated and the rich who have no compunction in eliminating the girl child. Many families are known to investigate the sex with the very first child itself, and certainly after the birth of the first daughter. Having a son raises the status and power of the woman and the family and having a daughter or several daughters pull it down. It is only social and legal intervention, aimed at reforming property inheritance mores, eliminating dowry and fostering equal treatment in expenditures on health and education that will bring the value of a girl on par with that of a boy. This kind of ‘civilized’ extermination of a particular sex and that too in the name of democratic ‘choice’ speaks volumes of the kind of values and human essence that is being created today in the global world of liberalization. Both these practices of female foeticide and infanticide are the result of the deep-rooted son preference prevalent in most sections of our society today. This son preference is actually acquiring new dimensions and is being strengthened by certain economic and social processes underway today.
Now what is the impact of this decline, especially on the status of women and on men-women relations? Common perception has it that if women are less in number than men, it would enhance their status as they will be much sought after by men. This is the facetious argument one comes across sometimes and has totally been believed in India. The experience of India is a convincing counter to it in the sense that instead of increasing the demand for girls, it has led to manifold increase in violence and crime against them and made them more vulnerable in many ways.
The status and position of such men who have to buy wives is also devalued in the sense that they become objects of laughter and disgrace and do not even get full property rights due to the social stigma attached to such marriages. There have been cases where some of these women are even kept in chains or under worst kind of restraints so that they do not run away. In certain other cases certain ‘husbands’ of bought up wives were forced to commit suicide because they could not pay the required amounts to ‘brokers’ or they had to face the humiliation of not getting married or their ‘bought up’ wives ran away from them for certain reasons.
Government lacks political will
After getting discredited throughout the country for this decline, the Indian government has in the past few years made some limited attempts at the level of awareness, has brought out some posters, issued instructions at various levels, and constituted state and district level committees. But looking at the magnitude of the problem, the government certainly falls short of the political will that it requires to tackle the whole issue and make effective interventions. For instance, the appropriate state and district level authorities and monitoring bodies have been formed under the PNDT Act but there is hardly any representative from women’s organizations who have been genuinely working on this issue for a long time.
Further, the role of the committees is mainly limited to cancellation of the registrations of various nursing homes and clinics violating the act and there has been negligibly few punitive actions against the erring doctors like prosecution and arrests. On the other hand, one can find strong lobbies of the medical profession who have repeatedly used their influence to ensure that criminal cases are not filed against the doctors violating the act. The government has also issued instructions for oath taking against dowry and female foeticide in schools, college and other departments but that is reduced to a mere formality. Moreover, looking at the content of the oath and posters etc, it is the mothers who are always appealed to as if they alone are responsible for the heinous crime. It is true that doctors are not doing the tests openly due to the PNDT act and some limited efforts on part of the government, but there is enough evidence that the abortion tests are being conducted in an underground manner in many of the clinics, with much more caution, and a kind of code words or code language has been developed to convey the right messages. Surprisingly, not only the doctors but the whole laboratory staff is involved in this ‘decoding’ business and making money in the process. In many areas the tests are being conducted at the residential places of the doctors; mobile vans are still in use to cover the far-off rural areas. All in all, it requires far more serious efforts on part of the government to implement the act in letter and spirit and at the same time to create an environment where young girls and women can play their social, economic and political roles without fear and favor.
In an age when females have made progress in almost every field, there are people who still accord a lower status to women. In some of our Indian societies, while a childless woman is perceived as incomplete, one who has given birth to daughters is partially complete. Only the one who has produced a son enjoys a status of sorts. The problem is intimately related to the institution of dowry. "If it's a girl child, we will have to spend first on her education and then on her marriage and dowry ... It doesn't stop there. We will also have to meet some of her expenses after marriage. Social pressures in India, and the presence of low-cost technologies like ultrasound, have led to sex-based abortion of female fetuses, and an increasingly smaller percentage of girls born each year.
The Ground Reality
What is a woman's role in all this? Does her choice or decision really matter when choosing a spouse, contraception methods, the first pregnancy or place of delivery? Is it really possible for a woman to decide about having an abortion, if she has to survive as a daughter-in-law in the family? Let's assume her husband supports the birth of a female child. Even then she may prefer to have a male child in order to get respect from her in laws' family, in order to save her marriage. If a woman doesn't have any say in this matter, a good case can be made that female foeticide is an act of violence against women.
-Niharika gupta