People's Democracy

WHEN news of female infanticide in Tamil Nadu hit the media in the early eighties it created an understandable uproar but nearly twenty years hence when the evil still persists to a noticeable extent – albeit its metamorphosis as foeticide in tiny towns included - public conscience does not seem too perturbed. But one issue that is disturbing in the way in which this is handled by the State is that most often it is the woman - mother or grand mother who ends up bearing the penalty for it. Sixteen women are 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 could have driven the mothers to such barbarous actions? The mothers’ own accounts pieced together from interviews and news reports offer some clues.

Pandiamma (all names changed) in her 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 lived in terror of conceiving a girl again. Her fears came true and her husband who visited her in the hospital remained sullen and silent. At her mother’s home for a month and with no signs of her husband wanting her back, she was caught with the dead baby, which the police alleged she had killed. Asked why she did it, she had said, bewildered: "I do not know."

Poovamma with three daughters is on trial. She said, "We had to sell our land to cover legal costs. Coming out on bail itself cost a lot. Now back home on bail we have told relatives and friends that the case has been dropped. Otherwise no one would have agreed to marry my daughter; and no one would have given loans 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 give them in marriage? If this appeal fails we are doomed."

Another young mother who had come to her husband’s home, on bail, had taken her own life. Her husband had told her, "The baby died in your mother’s home. So the legal expenses are your parents’ responsibility. It is your problem. Not mine." Death was the only way she knew to solve the problem. Lakshmi was a habitually battered and bruised wife of a womaniser. She spent time slogging in a mill to run the family and pay off his loans. 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. Incredible as it may seem, she naively believed her husband that if she accepted the charge 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. 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.

These incidents must be seen in the context of the brutally male chauvinistic societal values that pervade our countryside. Both sexes have internalised it. At an awareness camp for school children conducted by an NGO in an infanticide-prone area, the children were asked whom they preferred for a sibling - boy or girl. 99 per cent 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!

This is the scenario of gender perceptions that exist in ‘modern’ India in a hurry to catch up with the malls, MacDonalds and Pizza Huts of the world’s super power! Mother’s Day is observed here with super bazaars full of extravagant greeting cards, gifts packaged in glossy splendour as expressions of gratitude to the legendary Indian mother. But the real-life mother is often not even allowed the privilege of acknowledging her own maternal instincts and is put behind bars for killing her baby as a community custom and also as an act of mercy to spare her 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, 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 trifled with. Should not the State have launched a massive education to publicise the basic biological reality that it is the chromosomes of the father, not of the mother that determines 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 perception of the persistence of women’s subordination solely as a relic of the feudal society of the past is erroneous in the sense that it overlooks the impact of the socio-economic dimensions of post-independence development. 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 a 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). Compassion, humanness and the worth of the individual are totally alien values in our economic dispensation. It is this insight that was totally lacking in the declaration by the former state minister of social welfare that "infanticide should no more be treated as a social evil but be sternly dealt with as a criminal act".

A section of social activists working in infanticide-prone areas believe that while working to change social prejudices by a vigorous and dedicated State intervention, punishing those killing their girl babies could work as an effective deterrent in the short term. This has, in fact, led to foeticide on a massive scale - while the state government looked on unmindful of the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 94, which it had to enforce. Another point of view is that it is the father who should be arrested instead of the mother, as infanticide could not happen against his wish. Asked for an opinion on this course of action many agreed while some had reservations as they thought it would ruin the marriage and split the family. Many, including a large number of NGOs working in these areas are, however, against any punitive action and stress instead basic policy changes that would expedite attitudinal changes.

It is about time we began 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.