-The Indian Express
Prior to the advent of Modi’s “unscrupulous doctors” practising abortion of the girl foetus, Indian parents had enforced a son-preference society through neglect or infanticide of the girl child.
In his Independence Day address a year ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighted the unpleasant reality that India was a kudi-maar (daughter killing) nation. He said: “Have we seen our sex ratio? Who is creating this imbalance in society? Not the almighty. I appeal to doctors not to kill the girl child.” This was a first for a PM — to openly discuss the shame of our traditional society, the fact that we wantonly kill girls, and have done so for centuries. Prior to the advent of Modi’s “unscrupulous doctors” practising abortion of the girl foetus, Indian parents had enforced a son-preference society through neglect or infanticide of the girl child.
Modi also pointed to the culpability of parents who treated daughters and sons unequally. He zeroed in on a key ingredient of gender inequality — discrimination in educational opportunities between sons and daughters — and coined the slogan “beti bachao, beti padhao”. Social scientists have for long pointed out that intra-household discrimination in food, education and healthcare translates into higher girl child mortality and lesser human capability development among girls. But what India began to do from the 1980s and more starkly from 2001 onwards was to eliminate daughters even before they could be born. Or even before they could be conceived (by using pre-conception sex selection methods). Gender-biased sex selection had become the fashionable way of planning the desired family, one that had few or no daughters.
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Bhalla is contributing editor, ‘The Indian Express’, and senior India analyst, The Observatory Group, a New York-based policy advisory group. Kaur is professor of sociology in the department of humanities, IIT Delhi