Girl child in danger

Incidents of female foeticide continue to be reported from Punjab and Haryana, where
there is a strong bias against the girl child. This prejudice has its roots in the days
of the Raj. The existing laws have proved ineffective and more has to be done
to reverse the trend, reports Purnendu Ranjan

IF we go by the recent hair-raising incidents of female foeticide unearthed at Patran in Patiala district of Punjab and Pataudi in Gurgaon district of Haryana, we cannot help thinking that most of our policies and strategies aimed at arresting the crime have failed yet again. Such conclusion should not sound odd as both the executive head, the Governor of Punjab, and the judicial head, the Punjab and Haryana High Court, have already expressed anguish and dissatisfaction over the effectiveness of the efforts to curb female foeticide.

Certain prudent women activists, at the same time, have begun to openly question the adequacy of the existing laws and ritualistic awareness campaigns and other related laws in effect to check the heinous crime. In the circumstances, reconsideration of the declining skewed sex ratio, probably an outcome of mass foeticide of female foetuses, becomes pertinent.

There is a consensus among historians on the fact that the glaring gap of the sex ratio in the undivided Punjab began to raise its head first during the 19th century, particularly after the British Government and leaders of Punjab colluded in re-configuring the patriarchal values to serve their mutual interests. This is not to say that female infanticide did not exist in the pre-colonial Punjab. It was there but it could not disturb the natural sex ratio. However, it is equally true that the stray instances of female infanticide in pre-colonial Punjab found a congenial breeding ground for its alarming growth unwittingly in the land-ownership policies of the British Government.

Agrarian policies of the colonial government virtually led to the profound loss of women’s economic power and social worth. The property rights of peasants, inflexible tax demands and collection regimens precipitated the worsening gender inequality. These developments made women more vulnerable to violence in both their natal and marital homes. In other words, colonial state paved the way for the formulation of a ‘masculine’ economy in which the preference for a male child was inherent, but on the flip side, it also tended to foster the overt or hidden murder of girls among certain sections in the region.

The deprivation of women from ancestral property was worsened by the recruitment policy in the British Indian Army followed by the imperial government. Following the policy, the colonial government stuck to its policy of heavily recruiting from Punjab, particularly from the landed class of the Jats. The policy found massive support in the region as it offered to the male recruits the allurements of handsome wages, land and eventual pensionary benefits. These material benefits, too, exacerbated the desire for a male child in the region. In fact, the preference for sons in Punjab was also closely related to its being a war zone for quite long time and a popular recruiting ground for soldiers. Thus the element of the defence of the land considerably entrenched the belief in a male as a strong defender then deemed necessary for the survival of the Punjabi community.

The first and foremost notable fact, often commonly ignored in our post-colonial discourses on female infanticide, is that the earliest reliable reference of the crime, for a reader of the history of gender study in Punjab, goes back to the time of John Lawrence, the then president of the Board of Adminstration of Punjab in 1851, when he had a issued a circular for the people of the region, exhorting that beva mat jalao, beti mat maro, kori mat dabao (Do not burn widows, do not kill daughter, do not burn lepers).

The circular’s concern did have a long lasting impact on the census operations beginning from 1868 to 1941 in Punjab. In fact, these operations were not only important for the colonial rulers but also become an eye-opener for the agencies involved in checking the menace as well. The overall rate of the declining sex ratio in the first decade of the 21st century virtually made a mockery of the state interventions and half-hearted awareness campaigns in post-Independence Punjab.

The sex ratio in undivided Punjab during the colonial period as calculated from 1868 were as follows (numbers in the brackets denote the years of census operations): 835(1868), 844 (1881), 851 (1891), 854 (1901), 817 (1911), 825 (1921), 831 (1931). In stark comparison to these late 19th and early 20th century figures, sex ratio has, as per 2001 census data, reached the alarming level of 777 in Chandigarh, and below 800 in both the Punjab and Haryana despite the concerted efforts of Central Government and state and non-governmental agencies during the past 60 years.

The imperial government’s intervention to check the declining number goes way back in 1870 itself when it passed a legislation to ban women infanticide in Punjab.

The Government of independent India enacted the Anti-Dowry Act in 1961. However, it failed in its objective. Some scholars attribute the failure in arresting the declining ratio to both colonial and post-colonial policy makers, who kept on treating dowry as if it were the sole cause of the female infanticide/ foeticide. Consequently, these legislations, instead of arresting the skewed sex ratio, have been effective enough neither to check the dowry murder nor of female infanticide, the latter during the last couple of decades taking the anti-human forms of foeticide, usually being committed through the illegal gender tests facilitated by advanced scientific technologies.

No doubt, illegality of the gender test is acknowledged by every section of society, yet it is the neutral technology that is commonly held responsible for our failure to check the declining trend. Simply dismissing the efficacy of the existing legislative interventions is not going to solve the complex and long-standing problem of the region.

If we are truly serious to ensure the effectiveness of the awareness campaigns, we first need to re-orient it with an avowed objective of generating a mass movement which, in turn, would ultimately force our political masters to break the hard shell of the ‘masculine’ economy characterised by the biased laws on inheritance, property and land units in the region.

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