Can you imagine India's resources mobilizing to save a girl child? It is not impossible when you come to think of it. For twenty-four straight hours the country came to a virtual standstill when a two year-old girl fell in to the shaft of a borewell in a small village close to Agra in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Something similar had happened with a little boy from Haryana two years back and the nation had watched his rescue with mixed feelings of horror and hope. Two years later - though not wiser from the experience - similar incidents have occurred with alarming regularity. But while little Prince's (the boy from Haryana) ordeal did end happily, others have not been so lucky. And then suddenly there is yet more news of another child who accidentally falls in to yet another unmarked borewell shaft. This time it is a little girl. At a time when the country finds itself embarrassed by the imbalanced child and adult sex ratios from across the states and the government struggles to implement one policy after the other to plug the problem, for the cynic in us the scenes of the nation's resources being utilized to save one little girl were dramatically poetic. The armed forces were there and so was the local administration, the media and the entire community.
And then we are rudely awakened from this poetic reverie by the jarring sounds of two sets of parents squabbling over a child swap at a Chennai hospital. Both sets of parents are laying claim to the boy child and neither is willing to accept the girl as theirs. Simply put, while the fortunate boy has two possible families, the girl has already been orphaned - a fate not quite different from scores of abandoned girls in the country. Ironically, in a country where the religious divide is obviously evidenced so frequently it hardly seems to matter to either of the parents - one a Hindu and the other a Muslim - as long as what they take home is the boy. A DNA test will prove the paternity for both the children, but for the girl, the ordeal has only just begun. She is bound to face discrimination at every step of her life henceforth.
Apart from the denial of education - with boys invariably enjoying priority in most matters - and nutrition, health care and nurturing, the probability of the girl being married off at a very early age to shift the "burden" on to the husband is also high. And this invariably pushes her in to the cycle of early pregnancy, unsafe sex with the spouse (who would be much older), multiple pregnancies and the absence of healthcare facilities exponentially raising her vulnerability to STIs. What can one expect from a family being forced to bring up a clearly unwanted child? And that continues to be the manner in which little baby girls continue to be welcomed in many households.
And even as the passionately angry Minister for Women and Child Welfare claimed that parents who abandon their girls "are fools," the fact is that for many parents it's better to be a fool now than suffer later. Besides, it is the ministry that really systemized girl child abandonment by introducing the controversial palna (cradle) scheme, in which the government pledged to raise abandoned girl children.
The Anti-Dowry Act (1961) has been in place for a long time. Yet, the act of giving and taking dowry has become so inherently important to marriages in the guise of "gifting" that not only are very few cases registered but also they are registered only in retrospect when crimes are committed against the bride at her matrimonial home.
To add insult to an already injured women's rights agenda, the Supreme Court in a recent judgement only served to further legally entrench dowry by stating that gifts given by the wife's side to the husband's family even after the marriage, like at the time of child birth or other such ceremonies, did not constitute dowry. This is extremely important because dowry deaths do not always happen within the first few years of marriage and dowry harassment follows a continuous pattern into decades of marriage. With instances of dowry harassment continuing even after two decades of marriage, the judgement is a clear case of misinterpretation of dowry. The unending demands and torture for dowry have manifest in dowry deaths, suicides and mental and physical agony for the victims as the penalty for non-compliance by the girl's family. And this is despite the existence of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) enacted in 2006.
While laws exist against domestic violence, there are very few convictions because they continue to be treated as personal matters that need to be resolved behind closed doors of the home rather than brought in to the public domain. And while the husband carries no such restrictions on himself it becomes the burden of the victim to also ensure that the family honor is not sullied even as the abuse continues. Moreover, with huge age gaps between the husband and wife (since girls are often married off much earlier) not only is it considered correct for the husband to use violence to "discipline" his wife but the child bride is hardly equipped to stand up to this violence in any way.
And though there are laws that prevent child marriages its prevalence and practice is evident from the presence of innumerable elected ministers and politicians at mass marriages where minor girls have been married off. The traditional beliefs that guide social realities, the complacency that steers the government machinery and the fatalistic mindset that keeps the general populace alive means that the struggle to change the status of women and the girl child is long, slow and peppered with obstacles. Statistics point to a crime against women every three minutes: with a sexual harassment every 53 minutes and a dowry death every 77 minutes, laws clearly are failing to protect women and their rights.
