Gender Murder in India, 50 Million Girls and Women Killed Before and After Birth

Whatis is about Hinduism that compels rich and poor Hindus to kill their daughters? Why is it that Muslims and Christians in India are not as susceptible to the same practices? Some argue that it is the Hindu scriptures that direct such practices.

• “Killing of a woman, a Shudra or an atheist is not sinful. Woman is an embodiment of the worst desires, hatred, deceit, jealousy and bad character. Women should never be given freedom.” Bhagvad Gita (Manu IX. 17 and V. 47, 147)”

• Similarly another holy script of Hindu religious book preaches looking down upon women by terming a woman equal to a dog, crow and shudra (a low cast poor Hindu who has no rights in Hindu society).

• “And whilst not coming into contact with Sudras and remains of food; for this Gharma is he that shines yonder, and he is excellence, truth, and light; but woman, the Sudra, the dog, and the black bird (the crow), are untruth: he should not look at these, lest he should mingle excellence and sin, light and darkness, truth and untruth.” – Satapatha Brahmana 14:1:1:31.

Women harassed in “Incredible India”: Female genocide-Persistent ogling, heckling by Indian men. GENDER MURDER:-10 million baby girls killed before & after birth: Female gender genocide is destroying male female ratio in India. The tragedy of the unborn in India is a holocaust of catastrophic proportions. The murder of girl babies right after birth is the silent plague of our times and has to be stopped. A country that spends billions on arms cannot stop the barbaric practices of widow burning? The silent scream of the girls and women in India are drowned out by song and dance of Bollywood. The shrieks of the baby girls who are fed pesticide or simply strangled are not heard by the Western media that is bent upon portraying a false picture of modernity and power. Hiding the truth about Bharat serves the purposes of the new “East India Company”. Those who hide the truth are complicit in this murder. The world has to speak up against the genocide.

A study of Tamil Nadu by the Community Service Guild of Madras similarly found that “female infanticide is rampant” in the state, though only among Hindu (rather than Moslem or Christian) families.

John-Thor Dahlburgpoints out, “in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action.” (Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’,” The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.])

There are 50 million stories  about the brutal practice of girl infanticide. The strange thing about it is that the culling of baby girls is prevalent in Hindu families and not Christian or Muslim families. The murder of baby girls right before and after birth spreads across the spectrum–rich Brahmans to poor Khasatriyas etc. The female genocide goes on in rural as well as urban Hinduism. If baby girls finally are able to survive andgrow up, they are virtualslaves in rural Bharat. If the husbanddies, they are supposed to die on the funeralpyre with the husband. In rural Bharat–far from the maddening red light districts of Mumbai andDelhi, if the poor widow survives her husband, she is incarcerated in temples to be sold as prostitutes.

“There is a little-known battle for survival going in some parts of the world. Those at risk are baby girls, and the casualties are in the millions each year. The weapons being used against them are prenatal sex selection, abortion and female infanticide – the systematic killing of girls soon after they are born.”

The imbalances are also giving rise to a commercial sex trade; the 2005 report states that up to 800,000 people being trafficked across borders each year, and as many as 80 percent are women and girls, most of whom are exploited.

Indian Hindus abort their daughters, kill them at birth, or setfire to them when the husband dies. Surviving widows are incarcerated in temples as prositutes

Bharat is fast becoming the land of the boys. The infanticide of girls is changing the male female ratio and many males are without wives. Despite the shortage of women the infanticide goes on.

John Thor-Dahlburgnotes that “In Jaipur, capital of the western state of Rajasthan, prenatal sex determination tests result in an estimated 3,500 abortions of female fetuses annually,” according to a medical-college study. (Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’.”) Most strikingly, according to UNICEF, “A report from Bombay in 1984 on abortions after prenatal sex determination stated that 7,999 out of 8,000 of the aborted fetuses were females. Sex determination has become a lucrative business.”(Zeng Yi et al., “Causes and Implications of the Recent Increase in the Reported Sex Ratio at Birth in China,” Population and Development Review, 19: 2 [June 1993], p. 297.)

GENDER MURDER IN INDIA:-50 million baby girls killed before and after birth

• INDIA 1990: 25 million more males than females in India.

• INDIA 2001: The male female gender gap had risen to 35 million.

• INDIA Now 50 million. 51 districts in India now have more male babies born compared to female, according to UNICEF. “In 80 per cent of districts in India, the situation is getting worse“.

• According to a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of the World Population Report, these practices, combined with neglect, have resulted in at least 50 million “missing” girls in India

• As John-Thor Dahlburgpoints out, “in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action.” (Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’,” The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.])

Abortion, Female Infanticide, Foeticide, Son preference in India. India’s female to male ratio is 100 males to 93 females compared to a world average of 100 males to 105 females.

Tradition and religious edict in Hindu culture demands that the widow be burnt on the funeral pyre of the husband. The seminal film “Water” sheds light on the plight of Women and “White Widows” in which Depa Mehta sheds light on the issue of surviving widows in “India”. These “White Widows” are only allowed to wear “white” (hence the term “White Widows”) and are considered cursed and jinxed. They are ostracized from society and cannot live with any of the surviving relatives. In rare cases where the “White Widow” lives with the relatives, her life is worse than that of the slave. Dehumanized she is relegated to menial jobs, worse off than indentured servants, the “White Widow” is made to suffer a life of invisibility. Even her shadow is considered cursed.

According to a recent report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) up to 50 million girls and women are missing from India’ s population as a result of systematic gender discrimination in India. In most countries in the world, there are approximately 105 female births for every 100 males.

In India, there are less than 93 women for every 100 men in the population. The accepted reason for such a disparity is the practice of female infanticide in India, prompted by the existence of a dowry system which requires the family to pay out a great deal of money when a female child is married. For a poor family, the birth of a girl child can signal the beginning of financial ruin and extreme hardship.

However this anti-female bias is by no means limited to poor families. Much of the discrimination is to do with cultural beliefs and social norms. These norms themselves must be challenged if this practice is to stop.

Diagnostic teams with ultrasound scanners which detect the sex of a child advertise with catchlines such as spend 600 rupees now and save 50,000 rupees later.

The implication is that by avoiding a girl, a family will avoid paying a large dowry on the marriage of her daughter. According to UNICEF, the problem is getting worse as scientific methods of detecting the sex of a baby and of performing abortions are improving.

These methods are becoming increasing available in rural areas of India, fuelling fears that the trend towards the abortion of female foetuses is on the increase

Women harassed in “Incredible India”: Female genocide-Persistent ogling, heckling by Indian men. GENDER MURDER:-10 million baby girls killed before & after birth: Female gender genocide is destroying male female ratio in India

Deepak Mehta shows the plight of one woman–a story which personifies the neglect which according to her is faced by 50 million other Indian women. Mehta shows the reality of India in which millions of these “White Widows” are incarcerated in temples and then sold as prostitutes to keep their upkeep.

Deepak Mehta’s Canadian film was banned in many parts of India
The discrimination is not limited to unborn or recently born females in India. When a husband dies, the widow is supposed to die with her. Millions follow this tradition every year. Thousands are burnt alive against their will. Hundreds survive and show up in Trauma Centers in the cities. Many are never heard of in the villages. Deepak Mehta has personified these stories on film. All her films are banned in India and her life has been threatened.

As John-Thor Dahlburgpoints out, “in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action.” (Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’,” The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) According to census statistics, “From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 … the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. … In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] … Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death.” Dahlburg profiles one disturbing case from Tamil Nadu:

Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a secondgirl, she killed her. For the three days of her second child’s short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant’s famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil, and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn’s throat. The baby bled from the nose, then died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi’s square thatched hut of sunbaked mud. They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of … Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them. “A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?” Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child’s life eight years ago. “Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her.” (All quotes from Dahlburg, “Where killing baby girls ‘is no big sin’.”)

A study of Tamil Nadu by the Community Service Guild of Madras similarly found that “female infanticide is rampant” in the state, though only among Hindu (rather than Moslem or Christian) families. “Of the 1,250 families covered by the study, 740 had only one girl child and 249 agreed directly that they had done away with the unwanted girl child. More than 213 of the families had more than one male child whereas half the respondents had only one daughter.” (Malavika Karlekar, “The girl child in India: does she have any rights?,” Canadian Woman Studies, March 1995.)

The bias against females in India is related to the fact that “Sons are called upon to provide the income; they are the ones who do most of the work in the fields. In this way sons are looked to as a type of insurance. With this perspective, it becomes clearer that the high value given to males decreases the value given to females.” (Marina Porras, “Female Infanticide and Foeticide”.) The problem is also intimately tied to the institution of dowry, in which the family of a prospective bride must pay enormous sums of money to the family in which the woman will live after marriage. Though formally outlawed, the institution is still pervasive. “The combination of dowry andwedding expenses usually add up to more than a million rupees ([US] $35,000). In India the average civil servant earns about 100,000 rupees ($3,500) a year. Given these figures combined with the low status of women, it seems not so illogical that the poorer Indian families would want only male children.” (Porras, “Female Infanticide and Foeticide”.) Murders of women whose families are deemed to have paid insufficient dowry have become increasingly common, and receive separate case-study treatment on this site.Gendercide

India as World Power 1

Extremist Hindus show power using the Swastika in triple entendre–as an ancient Hindu symbol, reverence for Hitler and sign of Anti-Western Indian power

• Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, .. the country also has three Nigerias with

• that there are still close to 800 million people in India who live on less than $2 a day (Fareed Zakaria)

• “What you see issue after issue, state after state is that powerful [special interest groups] … landed interests have been able to capture the political system and extract government benefits for themselves [by way of] subsidies, etc,” (Fareed Zakaria)

• “It is a great shame… The large majority of people have somehow slipped though the cracks. So you see that India does worse than Bangladesh, worse than Cuba, worse than Syria, on all these measures. It does worse than many other countries that have lower per capita GDP [gross domestic product] than India has…(Fareed Zakaria)

• one has to ask oneself that if the country does not make significant investments in education and healthcare…(Fareed Zakaria)

• All this sounds very gloomy…(Fareed Zakaria)

Moin Ansari