India Dishonoured: Behind a Nation's War on Women

Contents

1.

Billed as ‘more shocking than Bandit Queen,’ when the film
Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women
was screened at international film-festivals in 2003, it certainly created a stir. Set in a small village in the middle of India, it opens with a young mother lying on a bed, surrounded by midwives, about to give birth. Her husband waits outside with a few friends in nervous expectation. Suddenly a newborn child’s cry is heard and the men burst into cheers, only to be silenced when a downbeat midwife comes out and announces: “It’s a girl.”

It’s a sign of things to come. The next day the father stands in front of a big vat of milk in a field, with his baby daughter in his hands. There’s a brief silence as his friend looks on. “Next year, a boy,” the father says firmly and submerges his baby daughter into the milk until the bubbles stop rising to the surface. They both walk away.

A few decades later the village has changed dramatically. It is now solely populated by uncouth, aggressive men who release their sexual frustration by watching pornographic films or going to dance shows where men dress up as women and dance suggestively. As men fail to find marriageable women even from surrounding villages, bestiality becomes commonplace. When the richest man in the village eventually finds the only girl around for miles, he immediately buys her from her father and tells her to marry his five sons. The sons have to share a wife or stay unmarried forever. She is not asked for her consent. And that is when everyone’s nightmare begins.

It made for such uncomfortable viewing that
Matrubhoomi
(‘Motherland’) struggled to find a distributor in India for years despite being shot in Hindi. Though the film was set as a bleak and dystopian vision of the future, in parts of India it is already becoming a chilling reality.

It is always difficult to predict watershed moments that change a nation, but they are always sparked off when an incident shines a searing light on a much broader problem. When thousands of women and men came out to protest on the streets of New Delhi in late 2012, it was clear their anger was not just about the gang-rape of the female student. ‘India Has a Woman Problem’ ran a headline in an article by Rashmee Roshan Lall in Foreign Policy magazine; Sonia Faleiro wrote in The New York Times that the capital, New Delhi, had become “habituated to the debasement of women”. Neither of them were alone in that assessment: Hindustan Times, India Today, Outlook, The Times of India, Zee TV and media across the world featured stories by Indian women recounting similar views.

Until recently most western media narratives on India have revolved around its economic growth or the rich fabric of its mysterious and colourful culture. We know about the country that produces Bollywood films, hot curries, cricket fanatics and engineering graduates by the truckload. We read about India’s tensions with Pakistan and China, and how those in grinding poverty rub up against rich billionaires living in 27-storey mansions. We see pictures from the millions who make the pilgrimage to
Kumbh Mela
, kids flinging colour at each other during the festival of
Holi
, or people lighting candles during
Diwali
. These are the images we are familiar and comfortable with.

The outside world has rarely focused on the status of women in Indian society as it has with Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. In June 2012, when India was rated the worst G20 country for women, there was a palpable sense of disbelief: ‘
what, even worse than Saudi Arabia?’
Yes, even Saudi Arabia, which bans women from driving, was rated better in a poll of gender specialists published by Reuters. They concluded that women were particularly vulnerable in India because of high instances of female trafficking, child-marriages, dowry related deaths and slavery.

The rapid modernisation and industrialisation of the last 20 years has created a new middle class and provided independence and security to millions of people. As social attitudes have become more liberal, women are visible like never before: out shopping, driving scooters or flash cars, buying houses with their own money, rejecting old traditions and even asserting their right to choose life-partners.

It is commonly believed these changes are tilting the balance in favour of women’s liberation; that education and rising incomes would ease the problems; that this is primarily a problem in villages. In fact these assumptions can easily be turned on their head. The contradiction of India is such that while women have more freedom than ever, violence against them is sharply on the rise. Furthermore, infant girls are more likely to be aborted or murdered among relatively richer and educated families than poorer households.

Of course, the attitudes that many Indians show towards women are common across the world. My aim with this mini-book is to illustrate how religion and culture underpins many of these attitudes, and how the intermingling of technology, liberalisation and economic reforms has created a toxic mixture that exacerbates the problem. These factors have come together to create an army of single, angry men who will likely never find wives and settle down because there simply aren’t the matching number of women. That is a problem not just for them but Indian society as a whole.

The outpour of anger and grief in December 2012 did not just highlight a widespread problem – it also underlined the fact that it was getting worse every year. The National Criminal Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded a 112% increase in reported rapes between 1990 and 2008. Assaults on women have increased more than any other crime recorded in India, while the number of girls under the age of six keeps dropping every year relative to the number of boys.

2.

Back in 1991 Indian demographers were taken by surprise when data from the latest Census reached their desks. They were convinced they had under-counted women from various parts of the country since the national sex ratio had dropped to an unprecedented 927 women per 1000 men, down from 946 since independence in 1947. For children under the age of seven, the drop was even sharper: from 983 girls to 945 for every 1000 boys. In some parts of states such as Bihar and Rajasthan the sex ratio was a stark 600:1000 - among the lowest in the world.

They ran some tests to check whether the Census was indeed flawed. It wasn’t. The cause, they soon realised, was a massive explosion in sex-selection before the child was even born.

The seeds of the 1991 panic were sown earlier in 1978, when, after finding that a worryingly high proportion of women wanted to abort female foetuses, the government banned sex-selection in public hospitals. However they hadn’t considered the unintended consequences – the ban sparked a boom in privately run medical centres offering the same services. As the industry grew exponentially over the 1980s, prices for the test became cheaper and affordable even for poorer families.

Private clinics weren’t just much cheaper; they actively encouraged parents to abort their child. An infamous ad slogan at the time called on them to, “Pay 5,000 rupees today and save 50,000 rupees [in dowry payments] tomorrow.”
1
Rs 5000 in 1991 is roughly Rs 25,000 in 2013 prices ($465, £300)
Parents who wanted a son, but would not go as far as killing their daughters, chose abortion.

In fact, it became even cheaper than that. Amniocentesis, a relatively inexpensive scientific technique previously used to detect genetic conditions, started being used to determine the sex of the unborn child. Ultrasound equipment was cheaper than ever – the test could be done for between Rs 70 ($6.50, £4) and Rs 500 ($46.50, £30).
2
Rs 70 in 1991 is roughly Rs 350 in 2013 prices ($6.50, £4); Rs 500 is roughly Rs 2,500 now ($46.50, £30)

In the face of pressure from some women’s groups, the Indian government banned all pre-natal diagnostic techniques in 1994. The adverts went but the attitudes remained. Some doctors circumvented the law by using codes; for example, if the ultrasound report was written in blue ink, it was a boy and if it was in red ink, a girl. Or if the report was delivered on a Monday, it was a boy and if on a Friday, a girl.

Some five years after the ban the Indian Medical Association (IMA) admitted that companies without qualified personnel were still offering sex-selection services to parents. Surveys consistently found that doctors thought they were offering a humanitarian service by giving parents the option to abort a female foetus, rather than facing a life of misery later. Only then did the government press the IMA to press doctors to obey the law and for the police to enforce it more stridently.

However if national statistics are anything to go by, the law has had very little impact, partly because it is openly flouted and rarely enforced. As recently as December 2012 a local TV station in Mumbai aired a documentary that caught doctors red-handed offering sex-selection and abortion services. There have been scores of such sting operations and widespread coverage in the media. The subject has also been covered in countless chat shows, magazine articles and was recently the topic of discussion on a prime-time show called
Satyamev Jayate
3
Translation: ‘truth always triumphs’. It is also India’s official motto, inscribed below the national emblem.
hosted by popular Bollywood actor Aamir Khan.

In 1990, economist Amartya Sen wrote a seminal essay in the New York Review of Books estimating that 100 million women were ‘missing’ across Asia due to sex-selection, resulting in foeticide and infanticide. He was referring to not just India but numerous other countries where the practice had become commonplace.

According to the most recent Census in 2011, India’s over-all sex ratio had improved to 940 women for every 1000 men. In comparison, Japan has 1060 women for 1000 men, US has a 1030:1000 ratio and UK 1010:1000.
4
Figures from 2012 CIA World Factbook, relating to overall sex ratio of the population.
In contrast, Pakistan has 943 women per 1000 men, Afghanistan 931, while China with 926 and Bhutan with 897 languish even further behind.

There are parts of Punjab – principally in the Malwa region covering several key cities and villages – that are referred to as ‘
kuri mar
’ areas. It translates to ‘girl killers’. A common way to dispose of an unwanted baby girl in this area is to place her in a pot, dig a large hole in the ground and bury her. There is a frequently used phrase for when the deed is done: ‘
kabootri marti
’ – the pigeon has been killed.

It’s worth stepping back here and asking a key question: why do so many Indian parents prefer having boys than girls? Why do they go out of their way to avoid having daughters?

The tradition of paying a dowry during marriage is perhaps the biggest culprit. It is customary in most parts of the country for the bride’s family to make payments to the groom’s family in the form of cash, jewellery, utensils and other goods. This is the dowry. Some historians say the practice originated with aristocratic Europeans who brought it to India, from whom it spread to the local aristocracy and eventually to everyone else. Others say it grew from a tradition that was meant to cement the bond between families and help newly weds set up their own home.

Whatever the origins, the cost of a dowry has grown so much that many families worry about being financially crippled by marrying off a daughter. Though the financial research is sparse, a survey by Vijayendra Rao in 1993 found the average cost of a daughter’s marriage in rural areas was six times the parents’ annual income.
5
Vijayendra Rao: The Rising Price of Husbands, 1993
In many cases it amounted to over 50% of the family’s entire wealth. It is highly likely the average cost has ballooned even further since.

Where did this boom in dowry spending come from? Rao found that a gender imbalance was created in the early 20
th
century when population numbers exploded as mortality rates fell. Since India’s demographic profile is that of an inverted pyramid, there were consistently far more women in the ‘suitable age for marriage’ category at the time (13–20 years of age) than men (16–25 years). This process accelerated after the economic liberalisation in the 90s that led to growing incomes and consumerism … and hence more demands for expensive goods as dowries. Lavish weddings started becoming the norm and the costs, usually borne by the bride’s parents, also exploded.

Dowries don’t just make daughters an expensive proposition, they also lead to abuse. After marriage many brides face the accusation that their family did not pay enough, with demands for more. Researchers have noted that this frequently leads to domestic abuse and even murder, to ‘free’ the man so he can re-marry someone willing to pay a higher dowry.
6
Vijayendra Rao, World Bank: The Economics of Dowries in India, 2006
Some estimate that as many as 100,000 women are burned to death each year in dowry-related disputes and another 125,000 die from violent injuries that are rarely reported as killings.
7
‘India’s New Focus on Rape Shows Only the Surface of Women’s Perils’ - New York Times, Jan 2013
Victims frequently face ‘stove burnings’, where in-laws pour cooking fuel over women and set them alight, so it appears as an accident.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a bride was murdered every hour in 2010 over dowry demands. “There has been a rise in the materialistic way of life across India and dowry demands have risen to become more extravagant in line with these materialistic needs,” Kiran Walia, chair of the Delhi Commission for Women told the International Herald Tribune.
8
‘Indian brides pay a high price’ - International Herald Tribune, Oct 2006
“It is one thing to give and take dowry. But what is really obnoxious is the torture women undergo because the dowry is less than expected.”

The government banned the practice of dowry as far back as 1961, to little result. It has been challenged in the media, led to scores of police arrests and well-publicised imprisonment of entire families, yet it refuses to die out.

The costs associated with having a daughter are not just limited to a dowry. In areas where farm work is the main source of income, men usually earn more than women. Moreover, since tradition dictates that women join the groom’s household, having a son ensures continuity in the family farm and his parents get another pair of hands to look after them when they are old. In other words parents are also looking out for themselves when they want a boy.

Traditionally, villages were tightly organised around a
khap
(a grouping) for administrative, judicial, military and tax-collection purposes, with strict rules that mandated that land could only be passed on to sons. This kept women dependent on them for financial security. The inheritance law was finally reformed in 2005, offering women legal equality in agricultural land, but the impact has been minimal; less than 10% of women in India own any kind of farmland.
9
Indian Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report, 2010.

This tendency to prefer boys over girls ends up having a psychological impact on parents. Researchers have found that Indian mothers tend to breast-feed boys longer than girls. In 2012, the UN Department of Economic and Social affairs found that an Indian girl under the age of five was 75% more likely to die than a boy of the same age - the worst gender difference for any country in the world. One government-funded study of young children found that 71% of girls were malnourished compared to 28% of boys.
10
‘Sourcebook on Violence Against Women’ (pg 111) 2001
They also found that boys were taken to the hospital twice as often.

A government doctor in Punjab summed up attitudes that are still common in a report in 1983
11
‘Female Infanticide and Child Neglect in Rural North India’, Barbara Miller, 1987
: “In one village, I went into the house to examine a young girl and I found that she had an advanced case of tuberculosis. I asked the mother why she hadn’t done something sooner about the girl’s condition because now, at this stage, the treatment would be very expensive. The mother replied, ‘then let her die. I have another daughter.’ At the time, the two daughters sat nearby listening, one with tears streaming down her face.”

These attitudes are not limited to India and do not seem to be dying out. At a rally in San Francisco in September 2012 to highlight India’s missing girls, Goldie Pabla, a young Sikh American, told a crowd in tears that she felt unwanted when she was growing up in the United States. “I grew up thinking I was a burden to my family. My father often said, ‘if I had a boy first, I would have had no more children’.”

There is a common perception that as India becomes more economically developed, this bias against women will ease. Unfortunately this may be a case of wishful thinking. In many cases sex-selection is more prevalent where families are better off. Whereas poorer households might be less able to afford to determine the sex of their unborn child or have an abortion, well-off families would have easier access to these services. Plus, well-off families are usually smaller in size and therefore mothers are under greater pressure to produce a son and heir.

A report by Action Aid in 2009
12
‘Disappearing Daughters’ Action Aid, 2009
found that in some areas of the relatively prosperous state of Punjab, there were only 300 girls for every 1000 boys among upper-caste families.

Renu, a 25 year-old married woman from an educated and affluent family in Haryana state, told Action Aid: “When I got pregnant the second time, I told my husband that if I am pregnant with a girl, I would abort it. I got my ultrasound done and they told me my baby was a girl. I paid 500 rupees [around $15, £10] for another ultrasound to make absolutely sure. When it was confirmed I spent 3,000 rupees [$90, £60] for an abortion.”