Two articles out on Monday provide a disturbing glimpse into how some segments of Indian society are “coping” with the ravages of sex selection. The first is from the UK based Independent:
Tripla’s parents sold her for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months, she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused, he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.
When Rishi Kant, an Indian human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla’s parents in the state of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears. “But what could we do?” she asked him. “We are facing so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her.”
Tripla was a victim of the common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women. [Link]
Normal laws of supply in demand would have led me to guess that when “enough” girls had been aborted, the ones that survived to birth would eventually become “more valuable” than men. I even imagined a reverse dowery situation as a possibility. Society would finally see the fallacy of its ways when men had nobody to marry. Probably like many who were as naive as me, I never accounted for the fact that a quicker way to deal with the problem was money. Just like there is a black market for kidneys there is growing black market for women.
When the police arrested Tripla’s husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual “brides” only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit. [Link]
The second article was sent to me by former SM blogger Apul. It seems that if you are a male living in Rajasthan then your probability of finding a bride is much better if…you have a sister. The arrangement is called “aata-saata”:
Long, twirling moustaches and bejewelled daggers are no longer enough for a man seeking to marry in India’s desert state of Rajasthan, long considered a land of fearless warriors.But if he is lucky enough to have a sister, he can relax, a newspaper report said Sunday.
A declining sex ratio in the state is prompting a girl’s parents to spurn offers of marriage from men unless the potential groom’s family also has a marriageable daughter for their son, the Sunday Express said.
“Around 30 percent of the marriages in the past year in Shekhawati region of Rajasthan were fixed on this swap system,” local lawmaker Rajendra Chauhan said. [Link]
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p>Of course, what both of these methods of dealing with the girl shortage have in common is that the girl is treated like property. Sold in the first case and bartered in the second. A man is now treated like a King if he has been blessed with the right riches:
…the absence of girls is changing village dynamics, the newspaper said.
“There are no girls. If there is one in a house, the father is like a king. He can demand anything,” said Prahland Singh, the head of Bhorki village in Rajasthan. [Link]
“There are no girls. If there is one in a house, the father is like a king. He can demand anything,” said Prahland Singh, the head of Bhorki village in Rajasthan.”
This is worrisome. ..because it goes precisely against your clever answer to the supply and demand quandary. I too assumed the reason supply and demand don’t work is that the demand (marriage) occurs so far away from the supply (pregnancy/childbirth) that information is too imperfect and people instead attack the problem with money. But the above implies that the demand (status) occurrs much closer to the birth of the presumably unwanted baby girl.
So while I am quite sure that infanticide is a huge huge huge problem, I am now concerned that the Hep B problem that China very possibly has on top of its infanticide problem is also happening in India–because there is nothing that will solve that problem, and women will increasingly become chattel.
God this is so frustrating . . .
But how do we know this isnt prompting people to want to have more girl children? Perhaps now (now = say in the past few years) more girls are being born; in which case its effect can be seen more clearly only a few decades down the line… I’m just saying its posible the severe shortage of women seen now could be masking changing attitudes happening due to this at the same time.
very very sad. u would have thought given their own ation of going across the country to buy a bride, intrepret sex slave, they would have thought better than to have killed her. but when ur an idiot and view people as property like cows and chickens and goats, what can one expect.
i dont remember where i saw this, probably pbs somewheres, but i recall there being a trade also from nepal into india as well. same story,parents poverty stricken, girls, barely into puberty, being sold. many times it seems they are being ‘bought’ as wives, when really they agents or persons are actually vending them to brothels.
and sadly, in the same report they showed similar things going on on other parts of s.e. asia as well..
maybe the UN should stop holding up traffic on the streets of nyc by having their stupeed conferences that dont achieve squat and do somehting about these sorts of things…
good post abhi.
Again, I see a time lag not being accounted for here – guess what is meant to be said is that due to lots of abortions of baby girls 20+ years ago, there is a severe shortage of marriable women now.
this is a disaster in the making for punjab and haryana. and to think aids was the big issue.
@xfile #2 attitudes may not change so fast. the issue is that parents prefered boys for 2 reasons: (i) from a farming point of view, (ii) brides go to live with their in-laws, hence they are seen as children of a different family. the first may have gone, but the second reason is still in force. sooner or later, ppl from other parts of the country will wise up. if that happens, your guess is as good as mine abt what can happen.
i cannot imagine what the parents of tripla must have to go through.
the first thing that must be done is to make sure the rest of india does not go the way of punjab and haryana. the mantra is the same, educate ppl about how girls can stand up on their own, how they can support their parents as well as (or in my opinion better) than boys, and now maybe with the story of punjab and haryana as a threat. if that doesn’t work, i don’t know what will.
This is SO frustrating. It actually makes perfect sense to me, though. If women were valued differently, Abhi, maybe your supply-demand idea would make sense. In my mind, though, it seems like women have already been commodified (female fetocide because females are just too expensive), and when the supply of this commodity dwindles, only the monetary value increases, but not necessarily their societal value. Does that make sense?
There is a v. creepy movie, Matrubhoomi, that is actually disturbingly close to the true story you describe above. Netflix has it (Netflix!). I’m sure I’ve mentioned this movie before (I couldn’t stop talking about it after I watched it) but it’s pretty powerful.
on the same note, there is not much point in sitting around and sobbing abt this. it is important to do anything one can to make ppl—i mean desis here, i have no patience for lectures—appreciate the magnitude of this problem. it is easier than you think, sign up for asha, or any number of organizations that help educate kids, and write to them. they are the ones you must reach.
I’m sorry — here’s a link to Matrubhoomi, and here’s a review of it.
Funnily enough it looks none of the Indian newspaper carried this story.Only The Independant and New Zealand Herald has this story by Justin Huggler.Is there something missing with the Indian media ?
You can also watch Matrubhoomi (the movie that Rupa mentioned) here : http://bwcinema.com/moviedetails.aspx?id=187
By no patience for lectures do you mean First World feminism- “Oh those poor women in India” type of bs?
Also, awile back when I was looking for South Asian NGOs to work with, I had my grandfather see what he could find on his trip to India (he’s friends with profs at several Indian universities) he came back with tales of NGOs gone awry as soon as they get some money. I don’t know how much we can do from here through NGOs because it would most likely come down to the patronage system, and that’s not necessarily a transparent process.
Here’s one organization that’s trying to make a change in the villages.
From the link:
One can argue, that reverse dowry has already begun in a way: Again from the link
In India marraige is a business deal. So laws of supply and demand are definately going to matter.
Does anyone know how pervasive the problem is? I’ve read many stories on this topic and they always seem to take place up north. Is that because the problem is localized there or because the no one has examined the extend of the problem in the south?
more food for thought.
i hope no one will chime in and point out the logical truth in the assertion above.
i do believe tho’ that this is why commonplace usage of aristotlean logic has limitations, … and i do practice more amorphous reasoning in day to day life – but that’s another thread.
it’s easy to be misrepresented and misunderstood on an open, impersonal forum like this. i’ll clarify post #15.
The writer probably justified himself by focusing on the “loyalty” in the sense of “obedience”. In that, any beast is probably more loyal than any human being, because the animal has no will of its own. So the statement is logically true superficially… The flaw in the argument is that the relationship between a husband and a wife is equated to that between the master and a slave/beast with no free will, and that is really disturbing in that this is unspoken and an axiom in the state of human relationships in the desert state.
Abhi: I believe a number of people have also wishfully (and very wrongly in my opinion) thought that fewer girls would result in them becoming more “valued” rather than “valuable”. However, when you look at women’s lives in strongly patriarchal societies such as in the Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan, it is and has always been about women being a commodity. When the numbers starting coming out 15 years on these 3 states, there was furious debate among feminists (ngo, non-ngo, concerned citizens) and the general public and both sides were firmly split on the commodity versus valued debate. No guesses where each side belonged.
In fact, my sister (an anthropologist) and I had a huge letter argument (the days before the Internet) in the India Currents with a moron in the SF Bay Area who spouted rubbish about Darwin’s selection, women becoming valued, and their price rising as a result of the shortage (I still have copies of the correspondence).
Trhoughout the 90s, my mother was the principal of a well-known private school in Jalandhar (the heart of the Punjab)…extremely expensive and the kids all belonged to uppermiddle class families. The ratio of boys to girls in this school starting at age 3 to age 8 was 20 boys to 5 girls!!!!!!
Sometimes, I despair of my own people.
sp
Unfortunately, this sounds to me like a joke taken out of context. The article did not mention anything about that either…
Frustrating as it is, I guess these things will not change all of a sudden, but has to percolate from urban to rural areas. Hopefully with the spread of education and a greater number of female role models, plus some hard campaigning by Govt/NGOs, this trend maybe checked. The recent statistics about reduction in AIDS infections does provide some hope.
This above sentence really rubbed me the wrong way. I have a real problem with this. It’s highly possible that these people were in the early 20s at best or maybe even mid to upper 20s. The article implies that sex selection that has come into light and apparently more rampant in the past 10 – 15 years or so is what has caused this problem. Bullshyt. I feel like everything that is wrong in India these days gets blamed on feoticide. It’s almost become fashionable. No one seems to find a solution to the actual problem….dowry and being able to afford a girl child in poor families. How is this any different then the 3.5 million babies that get aborted in the United States every year for various reasons including “inability to take care of the child financially and emotionally”.
I’m not trying to distract from the current discussion by bringing the “in the US” propoganda but western media is getting irritating lately by making it seem like people are induling in this for sheer pleasure. They are aborting for the same reasons the west is aborting babies. How is it different?
It would seem simple that supply and demand will reverse soon enough to make this problem go away. Unfortunately two wrongs don’t make a right and where women are treated like property and the attitudes towards women as liability don’t change it won’t matter how few of them are around. It’s not going to suddenly gain them respect. If anything these type of cases of wifesharing will become more common.
No one seems to address the root causes of these problems. Lets punish the doctors who perform the abortions because they apparently are the problem. All this does is creates a black market for these type of abortions, more backalley abortions and deaths.
Cases like these make the anti-abortion right wing nutjobs look like saints.
@sriram, #14 statistically the problem is worst in punjab, haryana and rajasthan. these states ahve ridiculously low numbers of women to men, less than 850f/1000m.
it is not as if the problem is not there in the south. we have an all india average of 920f/1000m, which is well below the 1000+f/1000m. you should have 1000+ women to 1000 men since women live longer, but it is not clear the numbers in the rest of the country mean foeticide.
kerala is the only state to have 1000+f/1000 males. does anyone know why india traditionally has had <1000females to 1000 males?
JoAT,
As has been discussed previously on other related threads on SM, the problem of Indian female foeticide isn’t confined purely to the poor. It also occurs in wealthier, educated groups. So people in India are not necessarily engaging in this practice “for the same reasons the West aborts babies”.
The female:male ratio disparity in some parts of India and the reasons behind it (and the consequences) were also recently discussed on the BBC News (on television, not just their website) here in the UK, so it’s certainly gaining a higher profile here.
So where are these cases of the wealthier? Why are always the poor and uneducated farmer classes being exposed if they aren’t the only ones indulging in this? They are justified for all intents and purposes in doing what they are doing right? If the wealthy class isn’t justified in their actions why does no one talk about them or make examples of them?
I’m not directing these questions at you just throwing them out there. I feel like we continually tend to get the ‘land of snakecharmers and rampant feoticides’ version from media and it always is laced with the “this is disgusting” tone of voice. I was really disappointed with even NPR recently having a discussion about this.
Statewise sex ratios from the 2001 census -> http://www.censusindia.net/results/provindia1.html.
Sorry the html thingy not working for me.
@shruti, yes, i meant ppl who will gleefully bring this up at every conversation from the second they know your name, but will not lift a finger to help solve anything. i am not sure abt all feminists, but i think we are on the same page.
@gtf, thanks!
@shriram, appears that most of the south has decent, not good though, 960+ ratios. turns out maharashtra is the only laggard south of the vindhyas with 922.
the worst offenders are delhi, j&k, punjab, haryana and goddamit UP. UP is terrible news, it accounts for a fifth of the population.
so my question that i didn’t complete—why do we have <1000f per 1000m as a norm? i doubt it is foeticide in the south (definitely not tn which is usually progressive when it comes to social indicators), or in manipur (matriarchal)? how come at least these places don’t have 1000+?
ok i am not sure who is to blame for it, but i have been cut off twice.
what i asked in both comments wsa this: why is it that <1000f is the norm in india, even in places where foeticide may not be the cause? i am talking of tn and manipur here. tn, for all its faults, is progressive when it comes to society and manipur is matriarchal. even wrt to krnataka and ap, foeticide, if it exists, may not explain the 965 to 975 ratio.
i give up. 3 attempts, the same question is cut off.
Sriram, it could be centuries of centran asian and middle eastern influence.
@anuj, you may or may not be right. but what i do know is that there is a good chance your comment will carry this discussion to manu again. let us agree not to waste time on that idiot.
It’s self-deluding to reduce this problem to lack of money for dowries and other economic factors. Every one of us knows Indian families, many of them living in the West for decades, which favour their sons over their daughters. Well-educated, middle-class women in India are still expected to place their needs and rights behind those of their brothers and husbands. Women are not valued in Indian culture. Period. The problem is cultural and not economic, and the sooner we stop lying about it the better.
Anuj’s comments: When bride burning was all over the news, there was a significantly higher reporting from north of the vindhyas. When eve teasing was rampant, it was north of the vindhyas again. I know there is plenty of anti-woman/bahu behaviour in the south but it doesn’t seem to take the extremes seen in the north. The south certainly seems to treat it’s women better (on an aggregated level).
Oversimplifications and generalizations have rarely if ever helped solve problems in Indian society. This is as bad as saying “All problems in India are due to British and mughals. period” – complications and nuances cannot be wished away as it has always been a part of what makes indian society diverse and culturally rich. bottom line (at the risk of restating the obvious)- these are not simple prolems which can be resolved easily.
Abhi writes:
You sound like a young man in a hurry.
Yes, eventually all of these will happen. But before things get better, they will get worse. Much much worse. I am talking of male-female ratios of 1000:200. Gangs of young men lounging around in street corners, ready to grab and rape any female(3 years old, 70 years old… does not matter). Gruesome riots over women. Bus loads of men going to neighbouring towns/states to kidnap women. Gang leaders capturing women and turning them into incubation chambers using selective breeding… to produce female children (year after year) who could be sold off upon puberty. The works…
And once the sickness and depravity of all this wears off (I am thinking 2-3 generations), then things will revert back to normal. Until then, no Government, NGO can do anything significant to improve the situation.
M. Nam
@31, dharma queen, i wont argue with you since i don’t know the families you are talking abt. but there is no reason for gratituous generalization. if you want to think it is the culture that is the problem, you may think so. from what i have seen, parents in middle class (south) india (not indians in america) are no generally different from anyone else–they do love their daughters, they won’t wantonly sacrifice their daughters like you hint. of course, they do want to get their daughters married, but hey, they are no different with their sons. but you must understand that most of older middle class india is loathe to put a career in front of family, and this is the reason for their misguided marry-the-kid-off bloodthirstiness. while i spoke of south indian parents since i know more abt there, my point is that culture in the south is not that much different fromt he north. @32 jayv, nope, eve-teasing is extremely bad in chennai, and in kerala. but not foeticide, i agree.
Here are some standard facts for the world. link
I think it’s a common misconception to believe that the ratio should be 1:1. It is almost never the case. The average is 100 females to 106 males for almost the whole world. On an average more boys are born then girls, this has been the natural case of evolution for a long time. At an older age male female ratio reverses because women outlive men.
In the last decade there have been many studies that have outlined all the different factors that naturally occur or have occured with time and post industrial development that affect the male/female ratio including and not limited to medications people take and environmental factors and a huge study about people affected with Hep B producing male children vs female children.
So 920/1000 for a country like India (where sex selection is prevalant is not really such a bad thing. When it starts dipping below 800 is when it gets freaky.
The solution is obviously complex, but I don’t see how the problem itself is ‘nuanced’. Where is the nuance in a middle-class educated Indian woman aborting her female fetus because she wants boys? Where is the nuance in widows being regarded as a ‘curse’? Where is the nuance in marital rape still not being recognized as a crime in India? Where is the nuance in divorced women being stigmatized as ‘promiscuous’? Indian women are second-class citizens in their own land.
@joat, that clears up some things. 100 girls to 106 boys would be 943, so given the slightly higher lifespan of women, 960 may be a reasonable number. but most of south has 960+, there is no reason why the north cannot have that ratio. also, the 985 in TN may be, like you said better healthcare since they have been proud of it for over a couple of decades now. they may get close to 1:1 by the next census going by pondicherry’s experience, while the other southern states may catch up a little later. so this is the conclusion i take, assuming the south has limited foeticide problems, a number below 960 in india indicates sex selection is going on.
31 dharma queen
Sweeping generalization aside, I have to agree. The problem is cultural. I don’t think it is uniquely indian though.
35 bytewords
I only have old info from my times in both places.
The south is certainly more conservative than the north but the impression I have is that if you watch what you wear* you are less likely to attract attention.
*Yes, yes I know….we should be able to wear what we want…
For those interested in male/female sex ratio and abortions, please read and analyze an excellent comment made by MD.
(Not that I’m advocating the what bothers everyone, including myself).
Jayv, #39,
eve teasing in chennai and kerala is not altogether new. but i didn’t mean to say the south was more conservative, i think it is the wrong impression most people have. they dress very much more conservatively, yes. but in my limited experience, delhi would be a backward village in terms of attitude compared with most south indian cities. the point i am trying to make here is that it is really wrong to look at the attitude to dress that people have and jump to conclusions.
Here in the New Punjab[Vancouver, Canada] this abortion of unborn girls in the punjabi community is a major problem. I knew of several familes who have done this sick thing just so they can have there ‘jatt’ son.
I have also heard in California with the U.S highest punjabi population is a major problem.
It’s so sad that my culture[the punjabi culture] treats girls like there less then boys.
The link that Joat (#36) provided is not working now. Did we really take down the cia.gov site? 🙂 (like Slashdot effect?)
Also, I will be interested in knowing the source of the numbers for TN (#38 – byteword), that looks quite healthy. I know for a fact that female infanticide was(is?) quite common in some rural areas of TN. Note that abortion was never common – probably because it wasn’t cheap enough. But all other problems – dowry, eve-teasing etc are still common and I don’t think it is coming down. Very sensible (and properly middle-class) relatives of mine still think in terms of “Oh who will marry her if she studies too much? Let her go to a arts college.”
41 bytewords: My point was that women in the south seem to be treated better than they are in the north. The eve teasing rates were not the the primary point of my post. Just an incidental observation to add flavor.
As the sex ratios stats suggest, the south does treat them better.
Because certain characteristics are pathological. XX Chromosome (or other non-pathological genomic criteria — ie eye color etc) is not a disease process. I think we’ve been over this territory.
Here it is incase you want to copy paste instead of the link 🙂 http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/2018.html
We had some relatives from India visiting and they were all joking with my brother..’Oh just tell us what kind of girl you want we’ll produce one.’ To which my brother said “Oh she’d better be smarter then me cause I’m a dunst.” He was kidding or perhaps not 😉 and the aunty goes “Oh you don’t want to marry a girl smarter then you, she’ll run away and cause you trouble.” Yes a woman said that.
These attitudes stink and I’ve seen them too often in people. Fortunately for me we are 14 girls and 3 boys on my mom’s side of the family and all the girls are overachievers and the parents regularly brag about this. This attitude runs deep and is at the core of the general disrespect women encounter culturally.
1) um, can some do a quick def. of “eve” teasing, sorry, heard it a lot here, never knowen the meaning
2) some people do believe abortion is murder, i certainly do, so abortion to incrase chance of getting male heirs vs. abortions because pregnancy just wont fit into schedule of school/career/pressure/whim is no different… ofcourse, imo
3) 1000’s of years of history tradion and culture where the female is regarded as inferior, though she bears the next generation, and for the most part, does all other essential household stuff also, and oh yes, raises th ekids and goes to pta meetings, or in my case, principals office when said kid in trouble… wont disappear overnight,without, tough legislation, and moreover, tougher enforcement… most places have legislation, most places enforce sort of casually, whimsically if u will…
4) ime, even modern men with foreign education and careers and loud voice proclaiming how they are progressive (though why it would be considered upper echelon thinking to think women have different but important roles??!!? bewilders me) still deeply harbour we are better sentiments towards women.
@43, eswaran, my source is the usual census data that is provided. tn does extremely well on almost all social indicators, and during my 4 year stay there, no govt gets tired of pointing it out. whether or not it is their accomplishment. i concur that infanticide used to be prevalent, that was my impression sometime back. apparently it is no longer the case. in this case it might have been economic. re: your relatives, their bias may be speaking through them, that is they way they have been brought up. but tell me, how many will insist on standing in their daughter’s way? i never claimed middle class south was not biased in the last generation, i did say they are marriage-thirsty. just that they will not be active perpetrators for their kids. stupidity yes, mistreatement unlikely. but if your point is that there are still (many) issues to be resolved, don’t get me wrong–i am not contesting that. no way. i brought up this point because dq claims that the problem is our culture. cpi-m has been speaking like dq for years, just look at the pathetic numbers in bengal where they have been in power for 30 years. and don’t give me kerala, it is not cpi-m’s accomplishment, it is the matriarchal traditions (admittedly not in the whole population). if one thinks it is the “backward hindoos” responsible, therefore chuck the culture you will be fine, (s)he is just barking up the wrong tree. @44 jayv, point taken. i just wanted to say taht it is not as if all is hunky dory in the south. doing better than north is not the point, one must do well on an absolute scale.
Here you go! It’s sexual harrassment generally way beyond silly passing comments.
j.o.a.t., s’what i expected, but thought best to ask.
cheers