It is again very disheartening to write about this issue as I am still not convinced by the people who give reasons why they want to kill girl child. I started my research on this topic three years back when I was traveling to North India. After visiting couple of cities and speaking to few people, I just realized that no media or NGO is ready to work on the actual reasons. Everyone is in the race of criticizing the Indian government, society, culture and the legal system.
But what I found is that there are two countries living in India, one is old Bharat – with extremely old value system and completely unaware that times have moved on. Another one is modern Bharat, which is very indian by nature but modern lifestyle, latest gazettes and freedom of doing anything we want on the name of liberal, free and independent.
The old Bharat thinks that women specially daughters are the pride of the family and shouldn’t allow her to ruin the name of the family by getting married outside the community or religion since marriage is the only way to throw weight in the neighborhood and family. I respect this old Bharat too which thinks a lot about daughters but they get fanatics when it comes to finding the life partner for her.
I almost had tears in my eyes while studying the cases of honor killing, specially girls, because if they have run away with boys, they have ruined their names, lost opportunity to find suitable boys through family, parents are not ready to keep them back, they are not educated so can’t work, society has mostly disowned the family so less chances of livelihood for parents too, often the boys back out after having all the fun with her, hence death is the only choice.
Why girls run away from the house? The major influence is Bollywood, its movies, its portrayal of heroine getting into the hands of true lover and life partner, modern lifestyle, freedom of doing anything they want, city culture, flashy phones, TV, Camera, glamorous life shown on the TV.
The second major influence is education centers. The colleges and university hardly teach anything related to value based education. It takes five years to teach degree which actually can take two years as the content is only that much. In such cases, what would young minds want to do? what they would think? why students have got all the time except studies during that age? where are they going to go to seek any advice related to life, relationship, health etc.
Why female foeticide increased in last twenty years? The major reason is definitely technology of ultra sound which was suppose to use to find the health and wellbeing of the child while in the womb. But the millions of people used it for all the wrong reasons. It didn’t stop in villages and towns, but it has increased in all the mega cities because of other various reasons.
It is very unfortunate to know that the modern India is indirectly responsible for the female foeticide in the small villages and towns. The flashy lifestyle we boost in cities are killing the women and culture of small villages and its people slowly. Its time we build the bridge of old and new and improve the city and village in its own way.
I am not going to discuss other reasons like fetish to have baby boys, social and financial responsibility, gender inequality, security, dowry, insecurity etc. We all know they exist.