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]
It is posts like these that make Sepia look like a third rate, sleazy tabloid. I subscribe to over 400 newsfeeds on India via an RSS aggregator & I see nothing to indicate that this “story” is being carried by even one Indian news outlet. Only links I see belong to western media outlets like the Independent.
I guess blogs too need hits – just like tabloids.
Sanjay, why the hell would we care about what is being run by Indian news outlets? I wasn’t even aware that there was such a thing (at least one worthy of any respect). Please, I’d be honored if you removed us from your RSS aggregator. Then tell a friend.
that’s a beautiful sentiment, sanjay. thanks for sharing.
sanjay:
ah well, indian media is not doing stories like these, so it must not be true…
and wow, u read 400, again, 400, newsfeeds, and wow, they all suck…
i dont recall sepia claiming to be the bbc of american-deshis, and if it were, many of us would then stick to bbc. its precisely posts like these together with a wiiide assortment of various subjects and interests that has kept me coming back, addictively..i am sad to admit…
and third rate, sleazy tabloid‘s dont run these sorts of things, unfortuanately, it has to be foreign media, or media run by deshis abroad, as we seem to have become calous to the plight of our own in our own countries…
No one is blaming the ‘backward Hindoos’ or saying ‘chuck the culture’, bytewords. But there is a pervasive mode of thinking in India that women are weak, silly, emotional, dependent, and all-round less worthy beings than men. I encounter this over and over again when I am over there (to a much greater extent than here, though yes, it is here too), and I am sure other women in this conversation can corroborate this.
Abhi
The honor is all mine. I insist. As for friends, I hadn’t recommended Sepia to anyone yet, even enemies.
Sanjay
“Please, I’d be honored if you removed us from your RSS aggregator. Then tell a friend.”
Why is there so much anger, Abhi, if someone pointed out something that you don’t like. I don’t think it is a tabloid piece at all – but people have different perspectives.
dude,
I removed the wow factor & there was nothing left in your eloquent post. Although your gallant & faithful defence of the jaati is duly noted.
Please do post again when you’re off the ground 🙂
sanjay
sanjay,
would you do us the honor of sharing your thoughts on the substance of the topics discussed in the post? it’s clear that you are unhappy with the messengers (sepia, western media, abhi, dude, et al). but what about the content?
i am calling shenanigans on sanjay
commenting on blogs wouldnt be the same if it wasnt for trollers and flamers.. actually, yes it would, and it would be a lot better.
Since Sanjay is probably off sulking somewhere, I’ll answer on behalf of all the Sanjays out there, with help from comments I’ve heard from some of my own relatives:
“The post is the work of persons brainwashed by American media, self-hating ‘twinkies’, who cannot see that in India Woman is the eternal Devi, worshipped and protected by males, and that events like the one described, if they happen, are exceptional and motivated by rural poverty and despair.”
sanjay, abhi, dude and siddhartha,
d.q., did u say skulking.. oh, sulking.. oh, thats different then…
bytewords,
you are creating slaps in the face where they do not exist. the capacity for seriousness in the indian media is not in question. where did i ever say “west is best”? nonsense. the indian press is a free and professional press with high quality and low quality journalism in probably the same general distribution as is found in other free professional press corps.
the question of professional ethics of foreign correspondents and their use of local freelancers, sources, and previously published material, is a very pertinent one. these practices are often exploitative, sometimes intentionally and sometimes out of ignorance. i appreciate you giving us some background on the particular item under discussion here. if anything, it should put sanjay to rest that the item was, in fact, reported in the indian media, even if it didn’t make it onto any of his RSS feeds.
please do not turn this discussion into some kind of “india versus the west” standoff. it isn’t. if it reassures you to hear it from me: indian journalism is generally solid and sincere, and the west is not the best. now, let’s get back to the topic.
peace
siddhartha m
This topic has been examined in depth by dr veena oldenburg of columbia in her book “Dowry Murders”. She set the standard, academically & otherwise, for anyone seriously interested in this topic – beyond the sensationalist tabloid level, of course.
sanjay
in keeping with what bytewords said, a search for this news item shows it was either featured or picked up by many Indian news sites around mid-March. and when they’re not salivating over celebrities or sonia gandhi or featuring the umpteenth article on the vulgar tastes of the westernised nouveau riche of india, publications like india today, outlook and other magazines (and regional language publications) actually do try to feature these types of stories that neither seek to do a westernised “drain inspector’s” report of social problems in india nor gloss over them.
sanjay,
thanks for the response. but what insight does dr oldenburg’s work shed on the topic at hand? sincere question. or to put it as bytewords did just now:
there was at some point on this thread an interesting discussion of the dynamics behind female foeticide, and more interestingly still, of the social consequences of the scarcity of women that has resulted.
moornam, with whom i usually don’t agree, put it in stirring fashion in comment #34:
i think moornam makes a very convincing case, at least in describing a worst-case scenario. other than objecting to what others are saying here and/or directing us to academic sources without giving us a courtesy summary of their significance, what do you — sanjay — think of the scenario moornam laid out?
peace
dharma queen,
Now that you’ve publicly trashed your own relatives, knocked down a couple of strawmen, won everyone’s deepest admiration etc., perhaps you can now focus on what I would really have said 🙂
“Go & read “Dowry Murders” & then we’re ready for a discussion on this topic.”
i think on a day to day level, this issue, at least in Punjab is related to all those little every-day attitudes which betray chauvanism that men are better than women. Those everday little social graces that reveal a deeper prejudice
bytewords:
what? um, i know i am often forgetful, but i dont recall saying anything about the indian press, or its quality, i was more making jest of the poster who called this for some incomprehensible reason a tabloid posting..
um, where u got the rest from is beyond me also. to me it sounded simply like trolling, as it didnt directly relate to the post, or in reference to another comment.
s’all. no need to jump in and say we are bringing in this west v. east thing, when infact, u just did that urself.
here is an asia society discussion between veena talwar oldenburg, of CUNY, and anupama rao, of barnard college, on oldenburg’s book “dowry murder” which sanjay asks that we read as a prerequisite to further conversation.
i’d be interested in learning more about the way oldenburg’s argument applies to the spread/extent of female foeticide today. it doesn’t seem to be a direct corollary. leaving aside that the theory is far from universally accepted in the first place. it would be much easier to discuss this substantively, rather than have to resort to the degree of acceptance or controversy of the theory as a yardstick, if someone actually laid out the case.
peace
Question at large: Why do some commenters refuse to engage in discussion on a relevant post unless somebody at odds goes off and reads some or other book that they think is the ultimate word on the topic? Although its great to hear book recommendations, last time I checked this isnt a book club, information isnt perfect, and that’s the whole purpose of discussions such as these: to generate ideas and sharing of informed (or otherwise) opinions and build bridges of dialogue, while of course having some fun on the side…I, too, think that if you havent got anything constructive to say on the topic at hand, then don’t dismiss others’ efforts to try to make sense of it….
And MoorNam: I think your situation is highly plausible with the way things have been going with dwindling numbers of women in parts of north india..I’m not sure how much of a serious situation this is in in south india, since I’m ethnically from kerala and there’s a general sense of well-being for women who live there in many capacities. Definetely a Margaret Atwood-esque dystopian scenario!
MoorNam’s post scares and depresses the shit out of me.
MoorNam’s scenario is terrifying not only for what it suggests – but the auxilliary effects of it all – a rise in right wing politics as a mangled and hyper masculine and sexually and socially deformed society seeks outlets for this energy – expect the fundoos of all religions and ethnicities to have a field day exploiting all that rage.
The future looks scary.
siddhartha m
Let’s just address one, single point. If the shortage of females were as big an issue as you and moornam seem to think, then why aren’t the following societies crashing? This is UN data expressed in males/ 100 females
United Arab Emirates – 195 Bahrain – 135 Saudi Arabia – 115 Oman – 113 Samoa – 111 Papua New Guinea – 109 Jordan – 108 Libyan – 108 Afghanistan – 107 Bangladesh – 106 China – 106 India – 106
There is no doubt that sex-selective abortions do happen in India today; that before the availability of “safer” abortion methods, female foeticide was indeed happening in certain northern communities of India.
However, this is a far cry from the doomsday, tabloid-y scenarios painted by many for India as a whole.
Sanjay,
You may not have noticed that this is a BLOG, not the spring session of Indian Women’s Studies 101. Inferring from your comments, no one should state their opinion on a news item without having read various books on the subject matter…
BTW – I thought SM was below your dignity? Why are you still here?
b. numnums:
go read these books and then we can discuss your question.
I have the perfect solution….since America makes it a practice to send their male youth off to wars to fight for oil rights, getting them killed, leaving a male shortage in America….so, that being said, we can plan arranged marriages for all those “femaleless” Indian males with our lonely American women!
What? You say that won’t work? American women aren’t going to make chapatis properly, don’t know how to wear a proper saree, won’t call her husband, just husband? Ack!
Well, this situation kindof reminds me of China and Japan….where are they getting their brides?
Ah, what to do?
dude, #70. last time i will respond on the alternate thread here. must i remind you of #54? in particular:
i don’t care what you meant. i go by what you write. it seems to me you think that if it is not “foreign media, or media run by deshis abroad”, it is “third rate, sleazy tabloid” and will be “calous (sic)”. but i wont respond further on this pointless thread.
but as we all will agree, let us get back to the topic. just got p1ssed off at the attack on the #70 comment. sorry abt that to every one else.
siddhartha,
much appreciated 🙂 I’ve added monday’s trolls to my wishlist to help counter those beginning-of-the-week-blues 😉
Sanjay – thanks for showing your true colours. Clearly the ethics of sex selection, and its expression of a pervasive mysogyny, are not disturbing to you at all – only the possibility of a MoorNamian (sorry, MoorNam) scenario is. Most of the countries on your list are hardly models of good societies, and in most cases, strangely enough, are reputed to be very difficult for women to live in.
Feel free to respond to this with a personal attack. I’m female.
75, sanjay
uae may not be a good example. the numbers will be inflated because of the large number of migrants for work, who will be males. similar case maybe in some other countries on your list.
but you can’t mean that the society is not breaking down. is tripla’s murder not enough? to me that is more tragic than i can let happen. there are several stories like this in china too.
sanjay,
the table you linked to is country populations with gender ratios. not live births by gender. come back with live births by gender and then we can talk.
as for your table: all the countries with more than 110 men per 100 women are heavy importers of migrant labor, the vast majority of which is male.
many of the countries with 101-110 men per 100 women are also migrant labor hubs, like Cote d’Ivoire for example.
other countries with 101-110 are ones where similar male preference is exercised (like… gasp… some of those icky muslim countries) [SARCASM, y’all]
take all that away and india is sticking out there at 106, followed by china at 104.
not a pretty picture, and certainly enough for moornam’s scenario to give one pause.
peace
Uhhh…I think a more valuable statistic as a counterpoint to these provided above, would be the MAN to NUMBER OF WIVES ratio in these countries…
dharma queen,
I have temporarily suspended my dignity 🙂 Just curious though about this seeming eagerness to gossip behind my back 🙁
Btw, you infer incorrectly from my comments. I said read the book before we can have a discussion. Expressing your opinion unilaterally is different from having a discussion. The latter usually requires at least two people communicating with each other.
bytewords:
wth are u talkign about??? who said anythign about asian media being tabloid, i was talking/responding to previous comment that said this post was tabloid, and i said, tabloid media doesnt carry these sorts of things.. i.e. nat’l enquirer etc, people who carry alien abduction and elvis sightings…
dude, drink a cup of joe or something.. get pissy, fine, but atleast get pissy at the right thing/person/comment
fyi, family has been in deshi media for 2 generations, .. on the contrary i often bitch about the lacklustre and superciality of cnn etc..
wtf dude.. get ur shi* straight…
birdie numnums:
hmm, exactly the reason i come on this board again and again, to read not only the posts, but other views, both agrreable to my perspective, and also, disagreeable. disagreeables are harder to take, but one does not learn anything or grow if one is only getting agrreable comments and platitudes all the time.
siddhartha m
For moornam’s scenario to be valid, it is gender ratios that matter, not live births by gender. People simply do not get married immediately following birth, such is my experience. I do, however, agree with your point about migrant labour being a plausible explanation for the gender imbalances of these middle eastern societies. Having seen how closed societies make up for people shortages, why do we fall for alarmist, end of the world projections a la moornam’s? A much more plausible scenario for an open society like India is that desi men will end up marrying foreign women. My understanding is that there are more than a dozen Eastern Europe countries with a desperate shortage of men.
Migrant labour of a different kind, eh. Sorry, couldn’t resist 😉
74 jay singh,
i agree. as any school teacher will attest, group dynamics change with the gender ratio. i believe we are only sane at near equal gender ratios. swing far from it, all bets are off.
does anyone have past census data? it will be interesting to see trends in the gender ratios. maybe useful to pinpoint places that are deteriorating the most.
Sanjay – no problem, then! Forget the whole discussion! Desi men can get what they need in Eastern Europe – hell who ever raised this trivial issue in the first place??
dude, I’m not sure exactly where I gave you the above impression? Perhaps you were extrapolating? But that is marshy territory…It was not my intention to ever make any sort of statement that I only like reading agreeable statements – that makes no sense to me.
birdie numnums, nope, i was complementing and agrreing with u, and stating why i like coming to these boards.
u got me wrong. the last sentence refers to me, i.e. who likes to hear disagrreable things to ones own opinion, but, thats where sometimes we grow and learn, again, refering to myself, not to u.
misunderstanding clarified – thanks 🙂
ok dharma queen, i concede you have shown me proof of #55 to an extent on this thread itself. well, what can be done :).
Sanjay – the TOI did run a few stories on this case. Do a search in Google News for ‘Ajmer Singh’. I had this dilemma on Monday. Saw the story, got kinda depressed, and then started blogging about it and then stopped.
Isn’t it sad that so many stories of female opression come out of the sub-continent? I swear one could have a busy blog just based on that. Every other day on PP we run stories on reports out of India/Pak/Bangladesh etc about something bad happening to our women.
After a while you think: what’s the point of doing another story on the same subject? It’s depressing man…. really depressing.
dharma queen,
The problem is very serious in many parts of northern India & the only issue is how to solve it. The people charged to enforce the law – the cops – very likely belong to those very communities/ castes etc that practise it the most. They have absolutely no interest, incentive or motivation to enforce the law. Not because they are morons but because they are perhaps well aware that, if not for the safer option of abortions, people would return to female foeticide (I mean real murder).
Oldenburg’s book helps us to understand issues in its deeper, historical context. This prevents us from falling prey to alarmist, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios & placing our faith on quick fixes.
Recently, several religious leaders have taken up the cause & this will likely produce more results than any laws GoI can pass.
Sunny,
One of the things I’ve learnt is to distinguish between symptoms & underlying causes. The same underlying cause finds expression in different societies according to the cultural norms of the host society. A land dispute will manifest itself along caste lines in bihar and along race faultlines in Zimbabwe. The trick is to understand & resolve the underlying land dispute, rather than breast beating about casteism/ racism.
I don’t mind admitting that veena oldenburg’s book was an eyeopener for me. It showed me that one of the great achievements of modern life – land redistribution to landless peasants, which gave millions of landless peasants property rights, dignity & self sufficiency, was also one of the great upheavals & curses of modern times.
Prof. Abdel-Wahab El-Messiri of Ain Shams University, Egypt makes a passing reference to “the famines that afflicted India as a result of the implementation of modern Western property laws”.
Oldenburg makes a similar point in the asia society interview link provided by siddhartha m when she says
These reasons for assigning land as property completely transformed the world. This was the deepest social revolution that colonialism ever performed. They transformed the relations of people to the land on which they lived. Now you had owners, now you had “haves” and “have-nots.” In the pre-colonial period, you had rights in land and the right was of use of the fruit of the land. But you did not buy or sell it. The way people controlled the land was to defend it. And taxes were paid to support the defense of the land.
Given that India is still 70% agrarian, the negative impact of property rights is a good starting point to begin analyzing some of the ills that afflict indian society.
come back with live births by gender and then we can talk.
Siddhartha,
You will never find that data set, not in next 20 years from now. There is no absolutely no (minimal) bookkeeping about birth except in North America and Europe.
Most of theses studies done in India are by using Government of India census data on children @ age 5 and then determining the effect female foeticide by proxy. Therefore, JoAT is saying is also correct and needs to be taken into account. Doing science by proxy is well established but one has to know the basic assumptions. Some studies have been done using upper middle-class hospitals in Chandigarh, etc, and then extrapolated the data. That is fine on a first order but not at all worthy of nit-picking differences between 105/ 106/107 ratio numbers.
Female foeticite is real and serious but do keep the source of data in mind.
Eddie, MD, Bong Breaker (three medical doctors), Expose, and I – we all discussed the whole issue a few months ago along with many, many other SMers – about the fragility of the data.
There are many issues on play: a) Poverty (someone will tell me that even middle class indians do it too, true – a middle class Indian is not a middle class American – they have a very tenous safety net. We all have seen people almost breaking their financial back for weddings), b) Seriously hurtful social practices (Dowry, etc.), c) Poor medical care for girls (schools in villages in India and Africa do not even have bathrooms in schools), and a d) Society that needs some serious changes.
Ideas by Sanjay are not without merit. By the end of the day, whom should I listen: a) a skeptic (or someone I do not fully agree) but has put some thought in their discussion, or b) someone going on some tirade.
Maybe, we need new Raja Ram Mohan Roys. Swami Agnivesh is leading a grass-roots, among many others.
sanjay,
your point from veena’s work is very interesting. but—this is definitely a bias i have and if anyone can convince me otherwise, i will be happy—a lot of social sciences, including history is just (well thought out, no doubt) opinion paraded as truths. sometimes, imo the opinion holds just because it is the flavor of the time, or the author being well known, or good writing. to me, the most that sociologists can do is to provide independent opinions, large agreement interpreted as “something is right”. which i don’t see happening in the case of “land distribution is the cause of trouble”. you can disagree with me, i will not contest any argument against what i have said above.
but, no matter how eloquently you disagree, i would hesitate to do anything that defies common sense just because a historian or a sociologist says so. besides there is not much of discussion in economics that i know of re: land distribution being the cause of problems mentioned in this thread.
so for the issue at hand, rather than look into property rights as a root cause, i would take the common sense approach of education. making people aware that a girl child is not a burden, she is just as capable as a boy, and letting them know how bad things can get would be if the foeticide goes on.
Sanjay –
I’m glad you mentioned Veena Oldenberg. I read one of her articles and it was an eye-opener for me too. But according to SM logic, it’s been 60 years since the Brits left India why are all these problems not solved. See if you can try and explain that some damage is permanent or the effects of the damage are still unfolding.
I think Moornam got a bit carried away there. People are already taking steps to educate the masses and this is being met with a positive response in many villages. People have begun to realize what a soup they’re in. It’s the South Delhi types who’re going to be left behind while the villages reform.