The BJP is planning to make their reading of the latest census figures a “national” issue. But if the party could only go beyond the usual suspects on its hit list, it may have been better able to comprehend the significance of a demographic disaster staring it — and indeed the nation — in the face: the sharply declining level of female children. Hindus, accounting for 80 per cent of the country’s population, have registered one of the most adverse sex-ratios ever, next only to those registered by the Sikh and Jain communities. The decline is most apparent in the more prosperous northern and western states, but when behemoths like UP and Bihar make their demographic transition to smaller families, the situation could assume truly alarming proportions. But not one word on the issue from the saffron stalwarts.The nation, however, cannot afford to be so selective in its concerns because the sex ratio portends social anarchy in the not-too-distant future. One just has to look at China, which is projected to have 40 million bachelors by 2020. Even the normally reticent Chinese have been forced to review the one-child norm that has been in force in the country since 1980 and although it has not been withdrawn as yet, its enforcement has been marked by a growing leniency. In terms of population control, China’s one-child norm may be regarded a “success” because several million births have been prevented as a result. But given the strong son-preference in Chinese society, these prevented births were more likely than not to have been female. The trend of declining numbers thus comes with a sting in its tail. Estimates put China’s urban sex ratio at 850:1000 in the year 2000, even as the rural ratio stood lower at 770:1000. It’s only now that the authorities are assessing the social costs of the development and demographer Li Weixiong has observed that the skewed sex-ratios pose a “serious threat to building a well-off society”. He has specifically called for a ban on mid-term abortions except for health reasons.India, being a democracy, has been far quicker to recognise and articulate the implications of adverse sex ratios. In fact, by the mid-’80s, women activists were protesting against amniocentesis tests being used for sex-selective abortions. In October ’86, a writ petition was filed in the Bombay High Court demanding a ban on such practices and, in ’88, Maharashtra became the first state to enact a law. But it remained a “women’s issue”. It took the 1991 census figures — showing 31.3 million more men than women — to broaden the concern. People now began to speak of the “missing girl child” and in 1994, Parliament enacted the all-India Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) Act, widening its scope through an amendment in 2003.Why, then, despite this widespread awareness and activism, despite state and central laws, and interventions by the Supreme Court and the NHRC, do we continue to be a be-maru or beti-maru (daughter killing) state? It highlights the three fatal fallacies that mark our approach to the issue.The first is the tendency to address the population policy and the female foeticide issue as two distinct phenomena when, in fact, they are intimately related. The aggressive promotion of the two-child norm — including the “victimisation” of those who have larger families through measures like the denial of government jobs and the like — will only result in the aggressive melding of age-old discriminations with sophisticated pre- and post-conception sexing methods, as well as in the systematic undermining of the health and nutritional care of daughters.Even the Supreme Court is not immune to this binary approach. While it directs the government to stop sex-selective abortions, it also upholds the soundness of a coercive two-child policy. For health workers, similarly, rounding up women for sterilisation becomes more important than addressing their health concerns and helping them to take rational decisions on family size. This is not an argument against smaller families, it is an argument against the neo-Malthusian blindness that marks our approach to demography. International experience has proved that smaller families are a consequence of social change and the all-round improvement in the status of women.Which brings us to the second fatal fallacy. Our tendency to separate the adverse sex ratio from other factors that disempower women. Female foeticide is, in fact, of a piece with other acts of violence against women — from rape and domestic violence to forced suicides and homicides. The devaluation process begins within the family and is intrinsically bound with property rights and dowry, inheritance practices. Not surprisingly, the women themselves have internalised the common sense of phrases like munde khet vich, kudi ret vich (sons are meant to work the land, daughters are meant to be buried in the sand).What has kept these practices from the public gaze is the concession we make to the private sphere. For years after the PNDT Act came into force, neither the Centre nor state governments bothered about setting up the administrative infrastructure to ensure that it worked. It is still not seen as a priority partly because the “family” continues to remain sacrosanct and its choices — viewed as “natural”, “cultural” — are accorded a high level of toleration. Public policy then has to go beyond the four walls of domesticity because, as the US philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued, normatively, the distinction between public and private should be questioned because it has “typically been used to insulate bad behaviour from scrutiny”.Finally, there is the fallacy of the Doctor as God. The medical community is largely unquestioned, unregulated and unaccountable, yet it remains the most culpable as far as the crime of female foeticide is concerned. Not only did doctors wake up to the issue a full decade after it figured in the public sphere — it was only in the mid-’90s that some of the more socially conscious members of the Indian Medical Association and the Medical Council of India actually talked of monitoring and punishing erring members — they have been in the forefront of the aggressive promotion of sex-selective abortions.Ironically, this is the one area that has seen a constant improvement of techniques and technology. Today, we have left the amniocentesis tests of yore far behind with our easy-to-administer ultrasound facilities. Tomorrow, with sperm separation methods, it will be possible to produce male foetus in-vitro for a song. Unless doctors are put in the dock for their malpractices today, they could play midwife to a future without daughters.
