India: No daughters in some villages
IT WAS the British who first documented the practice of female infanticide in India. One of the better known examples is the discovery by A Walker, British political agent at Baroda, of mass female infanticide among the Jadeja Rajputs of Saurashtra in 1805. The practice was prevalent even among the royal families of the region.
Lalita Panigrahi, in her book British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India, recounts the experience of James Thomason, a British official who in conversing with a group of landowners in eastern Uttar Pradesh referred to one of them as sala (brother-in-law). "This mistake raised a sarcastic laugh among them," Panigrahi writes, "and a bystander briefly explained that he could not be a son-in-law since their were no daughters in the village. Thomason was told that the birth of a daughter was considered a most serious calamity and she was seldom allowed to live."
The British outlawed infanticide in 1870, but the practice continued, even among the royalty. In the 1920s, the ruling house of Jamnagar was rocked by a scandal of the discovery of female infanticide.
More recently, in June 1986, the magazine India Today created a riot among the Kallar community in areas of Madurai when it published a story that estimated 6,000 females had been poisoned to death in the preceding decade. Media reports of female infanticide in Salem in 1992 prompted Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalitha to start a cradle baby scheme for the adoption of abandoned babies.
The methods used to kill babies are often gruesome. Starvation is not so common because the child wails constantly. The preferred methods are strangulation with the umbilical cord, poisoning with oleander berry juice or opium, stuffing the child's mouth with rice husk and drowning.
In urban areas and among the rural neo-rich, abortion is popular. Though sex determination tests have been banned in many states, their efficacy is doubtful because of the prevailing attitude towards girls. Even the educated middle-class sees sex determination as a democratic right: "Why can't I have the baby of the sex I want?"
A recent BBC film on female foeticide and infanticide, Let Her Die, documents how consumerism and modern science affect Indian womanhood and how male attitudes to female foeticide and infanticide are linked with the differences in values, perceptions, memories and hopes between rural and urban India.
Perverse principles
Rural scenarios reflect both feudal patriarchy as well as poverty. Some of the rationalisations of parents practising female foeticide and infanticide are: We don't have even rice to eat, how can we feed the girl?; She can't go around naked, the boys can wear a lion cloth and carry on, and, it is better to go through the pain for a moment than suffer for a lifetime. But these justifications cannot excuse the heinousness of the act nor mask male dominance.
According to the Chandigarh-based Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development, the strong preference for the male child is not dependent on literacy. In a a four-year study of 5,801 married women in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, it found thousands of female foetuses are killed every year in rural and urban areas to satiate the desire for a male child. Though half the women were illiterate, they were aware of sex determination tests -- amniocentesis and ultrasound scans. The study also found a correlation between affluence and awareness of such tests.