Avon Kanwar lives in fear. She is scared her food may be poisoned. She is afraid to sleep at night because she suspects she may be strangled. Avon, eight years old, is convinced her parents will kill her. “I don’t know where she hears such things,”says her father Sangh Singh, “We stopped killing girls in Devda long ago.”
But clearly this is no country for young women. A case of female infanticide was reported as recently as in the first week of April in this village near Jaisalmer in Rajasthan. An anonymous complaint was lodged against a young couple, Gulab and Banne, for the suspected murder of their girl child a day after she was born. The grandfather, Inder Singh, ironically one of the few men in the village to have embraced the birth of girls in his family, claims his granddaughter died of “natural causes”. The principal medical officer at the hospital where she was born, however, says the child was “born healthy and not premature”. Probe a little, and the youth of Devda open up. Says 21-year-old Nehpal Singh: “Yes, girls are still killed, but so quietly that nobody would ever know. If a girl dies soon after being born, they say she fell ill, or that she was born premature.”
This is the first ever case of female infanticide that has officially been registered in Jaisalmer. “I haven’t ever seen a case of female infanticide being brought to our attention,” says deputy SP Pahar Singh. “On our part, we have taken suo motu cognisance of the matter and are treating it as a case of ‘suspicious death’.” The body of the infant, which had to be exhumed from an abandoned ground near Devda, was sent for a post-mortem. “Since the body was so heavily decomposed by that time, the cause of death could not be ascertained. So now we await the forensic report which will reveal whether the child was actually poisoned or not,” explains Singh.
So little Avon’s fears are not entirely imagined. Devda, a village of about 150 landed Bhati Rajput families, has just 20 girls, and 300 boys. In more than 110 years, the village community has hosted just two weddings, as there are so few girls to marry off. Jaisalmer itself has one of the worst sex ratios in the country—868 girls to 1,000 boys.
An odhni screening them from the male shadow.As a late April afternoon in this village slips into evening against the outline of a vast dusty desert, a bunch of young boys run out of their homes to swing from trees, to play games. Nearby, trendy teenagers, most of them visiting home on a break from college, show off their driving skills in shiny sedans and SUVs. But there is not a single girl outside. The few women out on the street scurry into their homes covered head to toe in an odhni. “After the age of 10-12, they are not allowed to step out of the house unless they have school,” explains Sangh Singh. Ironically, Devda’s sarpanch is a woman, thanks to reservation for women in village panchayats. But Anant Kaur is not allowed to make any public appearance. In true Bhati Rajput tradition, she is relegated to the innermost chamber of the house, and can step out only for a visit to the temple. Women here walk in pairs, holding the odhni like a screen, so that even the shadow of a man doesn’t fall on them. It’s a tradition that has long been abandoned by neighbouring villages, but Devda proudly holds on.
In the neighbouring Ugwa village, residents have already woken up to the problem of too few girls to match the number of available bachelors. In fact, the age-old practice of Sata Pratha—where families receive a bride in exchange for their daughter—has come to their rescue. “This tradition has also helped reduce dowry pressures. Some years ago, dowry would start at 10 lakh rupees and go up to one crore. But now, we tend to give as much as we can afford because the tradition of Sata Pratha is like a security,” says Ugwa resident Padam Singh. As a result, Ugwa has a healthier number of girls as compared to Devda and other adjacent villages. “Of the 90-odd students in the village’s only school, close to 40 per cent are girls. Even though half of them quit school after Class 5, those who continue aspire to go to college,” says Himmat Singh, a teacher at the school.
Mum No More Bhati Rajput women at a Jaisalmer rally to protest girl child killing.But at Devda’s school for girls, the tale is starkly different. Of the 100 girls who attend the Balika Primary School, only four come from Devda’s Bhati Rajput community. “There are hardly any Bhati Rajput girls because there aren’t any left to attend school. When I was first posted here a year ago, I would get upset every time I heard a girl was killed in the community. But these days it happens so often that I have stopped reacting to it,” says a primary school teacher, on condition of anonymity, as she fears that if she spoke openly against the community, she would be driven out of her job.
There have been just two weddings in Devda in the last 110 years. Nearby Ugwa gives a daughter for a bride.
“The root cause for female infanticide is the curse of dowry,” points out Nakhatdan Detha of Seemant Kisaan Sahyog Sansthan, a local NGO which works at grassroots level against female foeticide and infanticide. “We have sent proposals to the government to secure a certain amount in fixed deposit for every girl child which can then be recovered at the time of her marriage, but nobody has responded.” While awareness has helped, the results on the ground are yet to show. “I get regular requests to know if there is a medicine I can prescribe to ensure the birth of a boy. And because information on the sex of the child is denied, female infanticide is more prevalent that foeticide,” admits Dr Usha Dugar, head of gynaecology at Jaisalmer’s Jawahar Chikitsalaya. The focus is back on female infanticide, with protests making headlines in local newspapers and TV channels. “People will be scared of committing such a crime, knowing that the state is taking note,” says district collector Giriraj Singh Kushwaha. More importantly, the media coverage has triggered a public outcry. “Over 2,500 girls are killed in the state every day, will you still remain quiet?” asked a placard at a rally organised by NGOs in Jaisalmer last week. An image that stood out in the crowd was the participation of a number of traditional Bhati Rajput women in the protest, who made a rare appearance without their husbands to fearlessly raise banners against female infanticide, and made their voices heard from under their veil. Nazron Kanwar, wrapped in a traditional red ghaghra and veil, was one of them. “I was forced to kill my girl child a few years ago, and it was time I came out to protest against this crime that many others like me are forced to commit everyday,” she says with quiet strength, clutching her five-year-old son close to her. Is there finally a whiff of change in Devda, and can Avon sleep peacefully at night?
