Can a father kill his baby girl? Is he so cruel? No, it’s the society which has made him do so. Had the society considered the baby boy and a baby girl equal, he would have done so? No.
Many customs and traditions we follow in a society are not written but they are transferred from one generation to another generation and followed verbatim without a logical thinking. The bias towards girl child is one such custom.
The possible reason towards this biased behaviour may be the exclusive cremation rites of parents given to the sons; the dowry system which makes bearing a girl child more expensive and virtually a big liability.
Considering all these gender roles, one can easily classify the profit and loss of bearing a child. From the above mentioned points it is evident that bearing a girl child is loss to loss strategy. So why girls? This is the very reason why many parents resort to female foeticide, infanticide, battering and discriminating girl child, inadequate diet and medical attention to girl child.
Now if this continues to happen, a day would come when we will see fewer women than men. The skewed sex ratio would see a worrisome picture in coming years if the same trend continues. The people who are killing their girl child today would not get girls around them to marry their sons. The picture may turn out to be more worse than shown in the movie ‘Matrubhoomi’ (directed by Manish Jha, released in 2003). Girls would become a rare entity. The practice of polygamy (many men marrying a single women) may creep in. Then, the condition of girls would become more worse than ever as shown in the movie. The situation would be appalling but quite possible with the declining sex ratio.
A women bears the baby boy or a baby girl with same amount of labour pain keeping him/her in her womb for nine equal months. But when he/she is born, he is accepted happily and she is rejected. Why so…. because she is a girl and many socio-economic conditions are applied on her.
She can be at par with he only when she would get the equal status in society as he has. She can only be saved when she has all the rights as he gets: the social rights, the legal rights, the economic rights etc. But as I said, the laws of society are not written but followed which is difficult to change in the patriarchal set up of society. Should we only wait and watch if it changes and be ready for the appalling situation of a society without women? The choice is yours.
(The write up is a reaction to the disappointing incidence of battering of little girls by their parents in Delhi and Bangalore recently.)
