The Missing Girls

Year 2030.

A male dominated family in Fatehgarh Sahib district of Punjab.

A girl child is born in the family and the facial expressions and gestures of the family members show that they are in a strange state of mind. Their faces exhibit two emotions, which are diametrically opposite, with each other - shock and happiness, both together.

Happiness because a girl child, a bubble of joy, is born after many years and generations in the family and shocked because they are worried about the future of the girl child, the way a person with the most precious diamond in her home would be, proud and elated to be the owner of the diamond and afraid because his most precious possession may be snatched away by someone.

Soon the visitors start pouring in to see how a girl child ’looks.’ They touch her hands and feet and most of them look at her genitals with lust in their eyes.

Year 2042.

The infant has now bloomed into a beautiful girl of 12 years. Despite her rosy complexion and shiny eyes, one can easily make out shades of paleness on her face and eyes. She looks afraid and stressed because of the looks of the people around. The teenage girl who is already under stress due to the transitional phase of her life finds it difficult to bear with the sick gestures and behaviour of people around, particularly men at every moment, be it her school or a party hall or a mourning room, she finds people x-raying her body which she has tried to cover well underneath her clothes. Most of them are so impudent that on the pretext of blessing her would try to touch her body every now and then. Few have also tried to make sexual advances including attempts of rape on her. The girl feels extremely unsafe, both inside and outside the home, fearing every moment, while awake, while asleep that some one may do something untoward with her. In fact she has begun to hate men.

Year 2048.

The girl has become a woman of 18 years. Despite all her emotional traumas she wishes to pursue her studies but her parents do not let her go outside due to security reasons. They instead want her to get off married soon. Numerous marriage proposals are pouring in. The age of the suitors ranges from young men of 18-20 years to old bachelors of 60-70 years. All suitors are willing to pay a hefty amount of dowry to her parents. The more the age of the eligible bachelor, the more the prize offered to her parents. Even bachelors from higher castes do not mind beseeching her parents to get her married to them.

Year 2049.

One finds that the girl has got married in a rich family, to a man who is only 20 years older to her but the agony of the girl has still not come to an end. She has been made bahu (daughter- in-law) of the family only to serve as a sex toy for all the male members of the family.

She does not do any kind of household chores but only satisfies the sexual urges of her many partners. She is not allowed to do any thing as per her wishes or to step outside the home. She is just allowed to lie down in the bed, nude, and entertain her father-in-law, brother-in-law and other relatives. She follows a very strict schedule but repeats only one activity all through the day.

The children and the elderly lead equally miserable lives. There is no one in the house to take care of these vulnerable persons. The elderly woman of the family does all household chores in a sluggish manner. She fills the water, cleans the house, cooks the food and serves the meals.

The children of the family either just weep all through the day or eat and sleep. Their lives have become totally dull and mechanical with no one to kiss at their foreheads when they go to sleep or pat at their backs when they get good marks or even scold them when they do something wrong.

Few months later…

The woman and all her sex partners are suffering from some kind of sexually-transmitted diseases, and it is suspected that young boys too are victims of the same as they too have started visiting brothels. The home has turned into a hell, where despite all kinds of physical comforts there is no peace, joy or happiness.

This is just a snapshot of our future if the trend of skewed sex ratio favouring men continues. Snapshot, because the writer cannot stretch her imagination beyond this dreadful picture, though the implications of adverse sex ratio would be multi- dimensional, affecting all facets of life. The other possible evils are child prostitution, gang rapes, kidnapping and sale of women, forced polyandry, cloning of females and even civil wars, who knows?

The story may have few exaggerations but does it not compel us to think that what is the future of ‘our’ nation? Is the fair sex in this country going to be doomed? Are we heading towards warped, daughterless families as the prototype of Indian society?

While the problem of population explosion is constantly posing a threat to the country’s prospect of development, the declining sex ratio has become another upcoming threat.

India witnessed continuous decline in sex ratio since 1901 to 1971 from 972 women to 930 women per thousand men respectively. The Juvenile sex ratio has decreased from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001, which is the foremost proof of rampant female foeticides and infanticides in India.

India had a deficit of 3.5 crore women and with a sex ratio of 927 girls for 1000 boys in the age group of 0 -6 years India was short of 60 lakh girls when it entered the new millennium. And there is another paradox. The steepest decline in child sex ratio has not been among the illiterate tribes lost in the far flung areas of the country but in some of the most prosperous corners of the country like Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Mahrashtra, Delhi and Bombay. Some areas of our richest states now have a child sex ratio of lower than 800. The Punjab – Haryana – Himachal Pradesh belt in the north is called by some’ India’s Bermuda Triangle’ – where girls vanish without a trace.

A pronounced skew in sex ratio has been a feature of India. Girls and women routinely suffer from poorer health and nutrition, infanticide and high rates of death from pregnancy and childbirth and experts say that ultrasound technology simply compounds an age–old prejudice.

"India is catching up with other sexist, modern societies like South Korea and China in sex selective abortions,” Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said. "It is a technological revolution of a reactionary kind.”

Since their introduction in the 1980s ultrasound clinics have mushroomed all over the country. In the far-flung remote areas where transportation is a problem and clean drinking water is scarce doctors with ultrasound machines can be traced. Even anti-abortionists use this method to get baby boys, as it does not involve “Blood-bath”. India is one of the foremost countries in the world so far as illegal abortions and female foeticides are concerned.

The reluctance of impoverished parents to raise large amounts of money for a girl’s dowry is often cited as a reason for the preference of a son. But this cannot be blamed on poverty alone, since the drop in the number of girls is sharpest in prosperous states like Maharashtra and Punjab. Some wealthy communities even go for genetic manipulation to select male foetuses. In such families the reason for son preference is that they want someone to take care of their family business and keep their heads ‘high’ in the society.

Thus either the girls are murdered in the wombs of their mothers or in case they get an opportunity to open their eyes in this world then certain traditions of killing female babies by putting opium on the mothers nipples and feeding the baby, by suffocating her in a rug, by placing the afterbirth over the face or simply by ill- treating the daughters, do not let them live.

The sad story does not end here. Women are forced to prolong their fertility careers because of the family desire for an ideal family composition meaning an optimum numbers of sons. Till this is attained women are compelled to endure repeated pregnancies, which affects their health badly and contributes to maternal mortality.

Entangled in this vicious circle along with social and family pressures women themselves prefer to have male children. They are constantly conditioned to accept that unless they produce one or more male children they have no social worth.

We have a great task ahead of us i.e. to change the mindset of the doctors and clients, to create a socio–cultural milieu that is conducive for the girl child’s survival and monitor the activities of commercial-minded techno-docs thriving on sexist prejudices.

To stop a gender-imbalanced society we will have to convince the doctors and clients, state and civil society that “Daughters are not for slaughter.”