Conversations with Kanwal S2 | Episode 5 | Female Foeticide

Karachi becoming a killing field for newborn girls

Edhi Foundation has found 355 such dead infants from the garbage dumps across the country in 2017; 99 percent of them were identified girls. And Karachi has topped in this notorious ranking with 180 cases in 2017. As many as 72 dead girls have been buried in the first four months of this year by Edhi Foundation alone in the metropolitan city. The given data is just tip of the iceberg as Edhi foundation maintains the data of those cities where it provides services.

Chhipa Welfare Foundation, another NGO, came across 93 cases in Karachi where newborn girls were killed; around 70 babies in 2017 and 23 in this year.

“Though people abandon these innocent souls but as a welfare organization we cannot. We give them a proper burial and perform other rituals for these babies. After completing the hospital and police formalities, we burry them in our own graveyard. The burial and other rituals cost us around Rs 2,000 per child. I wonder how poor can a person be that he/she cannot afford Rs 2000 to give a proper burial to their child,” commented Shahid Mehmood spokesperson of Chhipa Welfare Organization.

In many major cities of Pakistan, Edhi foundation installed ‘Jhoolas’ (baby cradles) so that the people should leave unwanted children there instead of killing them. The number of such sites is in hundreds across the country but this initiative received little success. One of the reasons for the lack of response to such ‘Jhoolas’ is wrath of religious leadership which believe this will promote illegitimacy. Although Edhi foundation claims they are getting positive response from people but their data is contradictory to this claim. According to Kazmi, the foundation received only 14 unwanted children in 2017, who were alive. Interestingly, 12 out of 14 were girls whereas the remaining two boys were physically unfit.

According to a police official in Additional Inspector General (AIG) Karachi office, Neelum Colony Karachi located near Clifton is one of the slum area of the metropolitan city. Majority of the inhabitant of this colony are living below the poverty line and are illiterate. Incidents of infanticide are occurring in those areas where people have no access to even basic necessities and Neelum Colony is one such area, brief an official in the AIG Karachi office.

Though police term poverty and illiteracy as root cause of infanticide but Edhi foundation’s office bearer has different views about it. According to Mr. Kazmi, in majority of cases infanticide is occurring due to out of wedlock births. Normally, people kill girls if they are born out of wedlock as this is consider a stigma. However if the baby is a boy the family try to protect him. “We have seen so many horrible incidents. One such incident which still I remember despite passage of more than a decade is the stoning of a new born baby who was found outside mosque”, says Mr. Kazmi.

“A few people found a baby at the door step of a mosque in Karachi and they handed the baby over to the prayer leader. The cleric decried that this is an illegitimate baby therefore he should be stoned. Resultantly the baby was stoned to death. I tried to register a case against the cleric but nothing happened”, narrated Kazmi.

The ratio of infanticide is high in the South Asian region. Particularly, the trend of killing girls is rising. The South Asia is well known for having more preference for sons than daughters. According to a study carried out by Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford, over the past two decades, son preference has become more strongly associated with the practice of continuing to bear children until couples have achieved their desired number of sons and daughters in Pakistan.

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Aamir Khan & 'Truth Alone Prevails': Bollywood Star Takes On India's Taboos In New Show

 A Bollywood megastar is making India confront its dark side.

Shining light on inequities like the rampant abortion of female fetuses, caste discrimination and the slaying of brides in dowry disputes, actor Aamir Khan has reached an estimated one-third of the country with a TV talk show that tackles persistent flaws of modern India that many of its citizens would prefer to ignore.

"Satyamev Jayate", or "Truth Alone Prevails," is a clever blend of hard news and raw emotional appeal – part "60 Minutes," part Oprah Winfrey. Its influence has even prodded the notoriously lethargic government machinery into action, though it's too soon to know what policy changes may be in the works.

After an episode exposed rampant medical malpractice and championed giving cheap, generic medicine to millions of India's poor, Khan was invited to address a Parliament hearing on health care.

Indians haven't seen anything quite like this. Hard-hitting talk shows are rare and certainly none has acquired even a fraction of the popularity and buzz Khan's has generated since it debuted 11 weeks ago. And Bollywood superstars have ventured into television only to host glitzy game or reality shows.

For many middle-class Indians – comfortable in their belief that their country had moved beyond most of these problems – Khan's show has been a gut-wrenching and poignant dose of bitter reality.

"Definitely it's reminding people that there are problems within our society," said Narendra Kumar, an environmental researcher in New Delhi. "It's also creating discussions and sometimes helping people find solutions to the problems."

The show forced Paromita Dey to confront an act she had tried to bury.

Four years ago, Dey and her husband Souporno – already parents to a teenage daughter – ended a pregnancy because she was carrying another girl. Like millions of Indian families, they wanted a son.

In the opening episode of Khan's program in May, Ameesha Yagnik haltingly recalled how her husband forced her to abort six female fetuses in eight years. How he threw her out of the house but refused to let her meet her infant daughter for months until she agreed to divorce him.

Both Khan and his audience were in tears.

So were the Deys when they watched the show.

"Yes, I killed my baby because she was a girl," a shaken Paromita Dey said, sitting in her home in a posh neighborhood in the northern city of Lucknow.

That India's highly skewed gender ratio is a cause for concern isn't new. Census after census has revealed that fewer and fewer girls are being born, despite strict laws against sex-selective abortions and a slew of failed government incentives and programs.

Yet Khan's show created such an outpouring of outrage that the government of the western state of Rajasthan, with one of the worst gender ratios, promised action, and a village head there formed a committee to check against the practice.

"It's both ironic and amusing that it took an actor from Bollywood to shine a light on the yawning gaps in Indian journalism," political commentator Tavleen Singh wrote in a recent column.

The show has done "what us hacks should have been doing over and over again," she wrote.

Khan, 47, began his career in Bollywood as a romantic hero in the late 1980s. But over the last decade he has broken new ground in Bollywood, fashioning a career path combining the social consciousness of George Clooney with the hero appeal of Tom Cruise.

Now one of the industry's very biggest stars, he has the cachet to push through any project he chooses. He produced, directed and acted in a film about the journey of a misunderstood dyslexic child. His film "3 Idiots" examined the sorry state of India's education system. He's thrown his weight behind social causes – joining anti-dam protesters and embracing an anti-corruption activist. The talk show has cemented his status as Bollywood's first true activist-star.

Khan initially was asked to host a TV game show. He refused.

"I want to do something dynamically different," he told Open magazine. "I continued to think about it, and slowly this idea was conceived."

"Satyamev Jayate" has tackled many horrors unique to India: the torture and murder of young brides for bringing insufficient dowries to their in-laws; the shunning and degradation of those at the bottom of Hinduism's caste hierarchy.

Others are more universal – alcoholism and child sexual abuse – but made worse by a conservative culture unwilling to deal with them.

The program is broadcast on several networks estimated to reach about 400 million people in India. Since its debut, more than 13 million people have posted suggestions and messages of support on the show's website. The alcohol abuse episode sent 60,000 phone calls flooding the Alcoholics Anonymous helpline, said the show's co-director Svati Chakravarty.

"It was unprecedented in the history of AA worldwide."

Rights workers say Khan has used his celebrity with remarkable effect.

Stalin K, a rights activist and documentary filmmaker who appeared in the caste episode, said none of the issues raised were new, but that Khan's show was giving them far more attention than the glancing treatment they usually get in India's media.

"It's a different level of engagement," he said. "The conversations are much deeper."

Khan's reputation as a thinking person's superstar adds to the show's credibility, but for the most part he keeps to the background – only speaking when someone looks lost for words or to explain something to his audience.

In a recent episode, Khan interviewed a university professor who had battled years of discrimination for being a dalit – the lowest Hindu caste. Kaushal Panwar spoke about being taunted in her village school, about not being allowed to drink water from the same clay pot as upper caste children.

Khan interjected only a few times, mostly to give Panwar time to hold back her tears, and once to admonish his audience and viewers that "if I believe an accident of birth makes me superior to you, that is a mental illness."

It remains to be seen whether the show's momentum can translate into substantial reforms. But Stalin says Khan's work is vitally important.

"This amount of discussion in such a short amount of time is unprecedented," he said.

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Indian campaign confronts prevalence of female foeticide

Elsewhere, it would have been front page news: a couple on the run after being caught trying to bury their newborn baby girl alive. But in India, where there are now 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, the case this week in Dausa, Rajasthan, warranted just 300 cursory words on an inside page. "Yet another incident of apathy towards the girl child", said the Deccan Herald.

Call it apathy, call it attempted murder. The fact is, said Zaheer Abbas, "most Indians are preoccupied with trying to eat two meals a day" – and not fretting about how the country's sex ratio has become the worst since independence in 1947.

Abbas, the editor-in-chief of the Udaipur Times, an online newspaper in southern Rajasthan, last year tried to jolt his readers into action by printinga picture of a three-month-old female foetus found in a sewage canal near the city centre.

"But look," he said last week, scrolling down his computer screen to look below-the-line on the article. "One comment. Just one. We want people to be angry about this. But they don't want to be seen by their parents and friends talking about such an issue."

Female foeticide has shot to prominence here largely thanks to Satyamev Jayate, a hugely popular campaigning TV show fronted by the Bollywood megastar, Aamir Khan.

One episode was dedicated to the widespread practice of aborting female foetuses, focusing particularly on the western state of Rajasthan, which has one of the worst sex ratios in the country, having dropped to 883 girls per 1,000 boys in 2011, from 909 in 2001.

Within days of the programme airing, Rajasthan's government sprang into action. Officials vowed to set up fast-track courts to punish those who practise sex-based abortion. They also cancelled the licences of six sonography centres and issued notices to 24 others for their suspected involvement in female foeticide.

A drive is also under way to install trackers at all sonography centres in the state within four months, which will allow inspectors to check how many female foetuses make it to birth and beyond. These clinics are the battleground for campaigners fighting against sex selective abortion.

"There's substantial reason to believe that the decline in sex ratio is directly related to the increase in sonography clinics in the region," said Shabnam Aziz from Action Aid in Rajasthan.

Dr Arvinder Singh is the Mr Big of antenatal scanning in Udaipur. The calm waters and Rajput palaces of this pretty lakeside city hide a murky secret: Udaipur is one of the Rajasthan districts which "lost" girls between the 2001 and 2011 censuses: there are now just 920 girls per 1,000 boys; 28 fewer than 10 years ago.

Every day his clinic carries out around 50 antenatal scans. A routine test costs 450 rupees (£5.30) – a not insignificant amount in a country where the average annual salary is about 61,000 rupees (£715).

Welcoming the Guardian into his office last week, Singh said that not one of his patients in the past six months had asked the sex of their unborn child – it was now well known, he insisted, that to ask (or tell) was illegal under Indian law.

But Manisha Bhathnagar, a local watchdog, said that the state of Rajasthan plans to file a complaint against Singh after undercover inspectors discovered that not all women at his clinic were filling out the compulsory form detailing how many children they have, what gender they are and who has referred them for a scan. "If we see from the form that a woman has already got two girls and has referred herself, we investigate," said Bhathnagar. Her office phones up women after their due date and if they say they had an abortion or miscarriage, the office investigates.

Kirti Ayengar, managing director of obstetrics and gynaecology at the Udaipur branch of Aarth, an NGO which tackles women's health issues, says there is only so much the state can do to crack down on female foeticide. "Technology is developing so fast – you can already predict the sex of a foetus at 12 weeks just using blood tests," she said, adding that what was needed was a huge societal, ideological shift.

"In my opinion, the tradition of dowry must stop, otherwise people will always find ways around the law," she said, showing us a poster in Hindi which ARTH distributes, depicting the first meeting of potential in-laws. "Don't ask for a dowry" runs the legend, above a picture of a groom's family looking at the bride-to-be and imagining money, a car and a house.

Pragnya Joshi, an expert on female foeticide from the department of women's studies at Janardan Rai Nagar Rajasthan Vidyapeeth University, in Udaipur, said the dowry culture was primarily to blame for the ever-worsening gender ratio among children in the city and beyond.

Though prohibited by law since 1961, dowry is ingrained in Indian culture, she said. A traditional Hindu wedding blessing was, "May God give you eight sons", she said.

What Joshi finds particularly alarming is that statistics show that better educated, urban women are more likely to abort a female foetus. "Literate women are becoming more prone to female foeticide," she said, explaining that they could afford a scan and understand the notorious adverts for sonography clinics which urge: "Invest only Rs. 500 now and save your precious Rs. 50,000 later".

Although the law against sex selection appears to be easily flouted in Udaipur, not everyone has an abortion. A disturbing number of parents are now abandoning baby girls, some of whom are taken in by Mahesh Ashram,an orphanage on the city outskirts, run by Yogguru Devendra Agrawal, a holy man with a long beard and a soft voice. The ashram has distributed posters around the city with the slogan: Don't Throw Away, Give Them To Us. "See that little girl, the cheerful one?" said Agrawal, pointing out a tiny girl with sparkling eyes lying in one of 16 metal cribs. "She was found in a gutter with only her head poking out two weeks ago. She was only half an hour old." He points out another baby who had to have an operation to remove spikes from all over her body after she was dumped in a prickly bush.

They are the lucky ones. Agrawal's team cannot always reach the babies in time. "One was abandoned in winter, right next to a dripping tap," he said.

Of the 71 babies to pass through the orphanage in five years, 48 have been adopted. However, the building site next door is testament to the pessimism Agrawal feels about the future: he is constructing what he says will be the largest neonatal intensive care unit orphanage in India, with places for 100 abandoned babies.

It is not unusual for an unwanted baby girl to be given a horrible name, said Usha Choudhary, programme director of Vikalp ("Alternative"), an NGO supported by Action Aid, Unicef and Oxfam. "I've met girls called Mafi, meaning sorry, and another called Dhapu, which translates as 'enough' – she was the fifth girl in her family," said Choudhary.

As part of an effort to encourage villagers in Rajasthan to celebrate, rather than mourn, the birth of a girl, Vikalp carries out alternative christening ceremonies, giving babies names such as Khushi (Happy) or Pari (Angel).

"When a boy is born, traditional Rajasthani villages erupt in celebration, with drums banged and sweets distributed, but when a girl is born then the village is quiet," said Choudhary.

Vikalp undertakes outreach work in schools and villages, concentrating particularly on young boys and village elders in an attempt to make them reassess their views on women's worth. "We say to them: if this female foeticide carries on, what kind of a society will we have? Can you imagine a world without your wife, your mother, your girlfriend, your sister?"

Choudhary sees the contradiction of the low status of women in a country where two of the most powerful politicians – Sonia Gandhi, head of the Congress party, and Pratibha Patil, the country's president – are female.

"Sometimes women say to us, why are you talking to us about women's rights when our president is a woman?" she said. "I always tell them that two stars do not make light in India."

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