The Girl Child: A Pall of Gloom Over the Birth of a Daughter

 **July 2006**

The Union Government is thinking of bringing in legislation making it mandatory for all pregnancies and medically recommended abortions to be registered with medical institutions.

The aims of the proposed legislation are lofty.

The government wants to check the fast-falling sex ratio in Haryana. But rules in India—a behemoth of population, institutions, sentiments, biases, conservatism and skewed modernism—only give rise to illegal rackets.

The nobler the rule, the more pernicious—and equally high-paying—the underhand economy that thrives around it.

The coffers of the higher hierarchies, which are supposed to help and nurture the bud of the rule, are filled by the racket; ironically, the defenders become the tramplers.

India, we should not forget, is still crammed with ageing mamas and mothers-in-law who ill-treat the girl child, whether in poor or rich Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian or any other community denominating our collective identity.

And the single-minded ones also contribute to all the blasphemy against this soft flower of law and legislation.

They go mourning, stampeding over all the modern notions of equality of the boy and girl child.

The birth of a girl is met by the family as if a tragedy has struck.

There are too many mourning eyes over the birth of a girl child in a family.

It is a silent but unremitting protest by the masses against the government.

Conservatism and old conventions in any age have the tendency to be mellowed down over a period of time, prodded by the changing times.

But such beliefs as the suitability and joy of having a male child are unyielding like a bar of iron.

The convention remains unruffled even though so many changes, which should have acted to corrode the rigid bar, happen almost every day in India.

In the countryside, still, the practice of going into gay abandon over the birth of a male child is the rule.

There are donations, acts of charity, public feasts, dancing, music and other celebratory noises on the occasion of a boy being born in a family; while a pall of gloom falls over the ill-fated family where the *kanya* has mischanced to arrive.

But, ironically, this battle against their own race is usually fronted by the elder females.

This is primarily aided by those household-hardened veterans—the women of the family.

Don't they feel that they might end up extinguishing their own species?