The New Delhi rape case
left the whole world wondering why India is treating its women so
badly. In fact, discrimination against women already starts in the womb:
India has some of the most distorted sex-ratios in the world. There are
regions where fewer than 800 girls are born for every 1,000 boys. For
many reasons Indian culture prefers sons. An expensive bride-price, or
dowry, is only one of them.day-by-day, thousands of
parents circumvent rarely enforced laws and have their baby daughters
aborted after an ultrasound scan has revealed the sex of the fetus. It
is estimated that India has been losing up to 12 million baby girls over
the last three decades.
I wanted to find out what it means for a society if such a significant number of women are missing.
In one village just two
hours drive outside Delhi, I met Narinder, a schoolteacher, and his
family. He had three brothers and only one of them got married. There
weren't enough brides, because the village has been aborting their
daughters for decades.
Narinder told me that he
had already reached out to an agent who would find him a bride from
afar. In fact, he planned to share this bride with his brothers.
I felt sorry for
Narinder, because he totally understood that his misery was due to the
fact that his village has been actively selecting for sons. Still, in a
quiet moment, he confided to me, that if his purchased wife would be
pregnant, he'd make sure it was a son. I was perplexed. Everyone in this
village knew it was wrong to prefer sons over girls, everyone
experienced the problems firsthand.
And still, like sleepwalkers, they continued their way, because culture dictates that sons are a blessing and daughters a curse.
After the Delhi rape
case, the whole world looked at India in disbelief, its urban middle
class took to the streets. I returned to India to meet Shafiq Khan, a
former Maoist rebel, who realized that violence is not the way forward.
Shafiq now uses his wit and bravery to make inroads into rural India's
patriarchal societies.
We hit the dusty
streets, down to Haryana where Shafiq introduced me to women who do not
have a voice, women for whom nobody demonstrates. They are abused and
raped and sold like cattle and nobody cares. They are called Paro, or
strangers. They are the sort of women Narinder will buy -- those who
make up for the scores who are never born.
Akhleema and Tasleema,
two sisters from Kolkata, were born into a poor family, before her aunt
sold them via an agent to two brothers in Haryana, who could not find a
bride. Within weeks, Akhleema was beaten so hard by her husband, that
she lost hearing in her left ear. Both spend their time cooking,
cleaning and tending the fields. They have no rights, no voice and, most
shockingly: there is no way back. They have children with their men and
it is culturally unacceptable to leave them behind.
But where are all these
trafficked women coming from? In a cruel paradox, it's the poor
northeastern states of India, like West Bengal or Assam, where
sex-ratios aren't that skewed, that make up for large parts of all the
missing women.
Assam is beautiful, even during the dry season. The Brahmaputra winds its way through the plains, quietly and peacefully.But don't be mistaken",
Shafiq says. Because during the rainy season, the river erupts over its
banks, destroys fields and villages. In these already poverty-stricken
regions, flooding takes away the little people have. Thousands of
families are pushed into poverty and helplessness. They end up in flood
shelters, vulnerable and easy prey for traffickers, like Saleha and her
husband Husain. Their daughter Jaida went missing two years ago. They
saw a man entering the hamlet and talking to Jaida. She vanished without
a trace.
In a remote village on
the dusty floodplains we meet Halida. She had just turned 14, when a man
kidnapped her while fetching water. For two days he raped Halida, told
her that he would bring her to Delhi in order to sell her. Halida could
escape, but now she cannot go to school anymore, because all the
children know of the rape and tease her. The parents, day-laborers,
cannot find work anymore, because they are ostracized by the whole
village. The rape destroyed the family.
While the trafficker may
have lost his prey, it's unlikely that he will ever be punished. The
police are corrupt and the more destruction there is, the easier it will
be for him to find new victims.
Thus closes a vicious
circle in which millions of India's women are trapped. The prejudices
against women are so deeply engrained in the cultural fabric, that only a
combined effort, old and young, urban and rural, will be able to break
it once and for all.
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