Non-Existent Identity

Manjus’s son Jitender is of marriageable age. They are desperately searching for a bride. Manju is taking care of the family since the age of sixteen when she came in this family as a bride. Her heart bleeds when she thinks of that dark day of her life. She was seventeen years old and was having painful bouts of labour. The midwife helped her deliver and finally she heard the child cry. She still remembers how much she wanted to touch the child, feel her and pull her to her breast. But her mother- in- law intervened; she snatched the baby from the midwife. Before she could even see her child she fell unconscious. She never saw the innocent child who lost her right to live because she was a girl. Luckily in her second and third pregnancy she could bear boy child. So they saw the light of day. Till date she longs to experience that bond, that warmth which she would have developed with her daughter.

Now she is looking for that daughter in her daughter in laws. This unending search for that lost soul who she has framed in her thoughts is not matching with the girls in real life and over all with the uneven male- female ratio the search is getting more and more difficult.

“Gur kaayeen punee kateen, aap na ayeen bhayee nuu khaleen” (Eat sugar, weave cotton, don’t come back, send your brother). This chant is a part of the ritual for burying a female child alive by placing her in an earthen pitcher, with cane sugar in her mouth and cotton in her hands. Various methods used to kill a female baby are starving her to death, suffocating her by wrapping her tightly in a quilt, poisoning her, strangling her, drowning her, or breaking her spinal cord by snapping it. Do these chill your spine? If not then here are some more brutal ways like shooting in broad daylight or gang raping – these are no less disturbing.

This grave human rights violation of denying birth to a female child or not allowing her to live because she is a female have a far-reaching impact on society as a whole. It not only affects the communities in which such practices flourish; it also impacts in many ways on the national and international communities where female infanticide and feticide may not occur. Social unrest as a result of the disproportionate female and male gender ratio may manifest itself as crime in these societies, for example, the kidnapping of young women, forced marriages, sex crimes, wife purchasing, frustration-related psychological problems and an increase in prostitution.

The Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques in its inception phase (1950s) was considered a boon as it could detect the abnormalities inside the womb from the cells of the amniotic fluid and the development of the fetus could be measured by the ultra sound scanning. But in the present context it has become a tool to determine the sex of the infant and play with its destiny. This has contributed greatly in screwing the male female ratio in Indian society.

If we talk about artificial fertilization or in vitro fertilization sperm preserved in sperm banks can fertilize eggs in vitro (in a test tube) but after the zygote is formed it has to be implanted in a womb for further growth. In coming days maintaining this trend no wombs will be left. Countdown have started first the tigers and lions and then homo sapiens (human beings)-will get extinct. This is the right time to think and act, take action before it is too late.