A tribute to Manju Singh

My apologies to the readers of my blog for staying away a very, very, very long time. I'm back. With a piece on a very interesting person I met on my journeys as a field researcher for Satyamev Jayate. Her name is Manju Singh and this is her story...

"The day I was born, my father tried to bury me alive," Manju Singh tells me. "The moment he knew he'd had a daughter, he charged into the windowless room in which my mother had delivered me and started digging a hole in the mud floor. The umbilical cord had just been cut. My maternal grandmother scooped me up and fled."

Seated on her haunches before a wood stove in her outdoor kitchen in the north Indian state of Haryana, Singh is cooking breakfast. It's winter, around dawn, and the 35-year-old mother of two speaks in a matter-of-fact tone, not allowing her narrative to interrupt the rapid motion of her rolling pin. The year is 2012 and there's bad news from India’s census report that has just been published. The number of girls born versus the number of  boys in the previous decade has fallen drastically.

"That I lived is nothing short of a miracle," she continues. "My mother had to fight real hard to keep me alive. Even while I was growing up my father tried several times to kill me. He'd beat me to pulp. But somehow, I lived through it all. I was just that stubborn." She laughs.

For generations, no girl child in Singh's family had been allowed to live. When she was ten, her father told her that he had watched his own sister get buried alive by his father. Killing newborn female progeny was a family tradition. There was a strictly "sons only" policy, and it was implemented ruthlessly.

What happened in Singh's family over generations was neither an isolated instance nor an aberration. Female infanticide has been practiced in certain regions of India for centuries. The methods varied from region to region but all were equally macabre—feeding the baby grain husk to cut the windpipe, a morself of rice to choke her, tobacco juice to poison her. Also strangulation, starvation, overfeeding, and the fate Singh escaped—being buried alive.

 Throughout history and into the late 20th century, the practice of female infanticide has been an unfortunate confluence of culture and economics. "Some women," authors John Anderson and Molly Moore write, "believe that sacrificing a daughter guarantees a son in the next pregnancy. In other cases, the family cannot afford the dowry that would eventually be demanded for a girl's marriage. And for many mothers, sentencing a daughter to death is better than condemning her to life as a woman in the Third World, with cradle-to-grave discrimination, poverty, sickness and drudgery."

Breakfast cooked, Singh is now vigorously working the hand-pump in the courtyard to fill water for her family's needs for the day. While she works, she tells me about traditional rituals that accompanied infanticide in different parts of the country. "In the state of Rajasthan there's a popular song that urges the daughter not to return to this land. They used to sing that after they killed the infant. And in Punjab they would place the girl alive in an earthen pot with a lump of jaggery, some gram and raw cotton yarn. Then they buried the pot while chanting—'Eat this jaggery, spin this cotton. Don't come back. The next time, send your brother instead.'" When I ask why gram, jaggery and yarn, she explains, "Gram and jaggery are symbols of celebrating a boy child. And the cotton yarn is what a sister ties on her brother's wrist to ask for his protection. These male symbols are meant to invoke a son."

Singh now works as a health and gender rights advocate in her community in Ambala District, Haryana. An important part of her job involves helping educate village women to prevent the crime her father once tried to commit against her. "I work very closely with women to understand their concerns, the pressures they face. I never preach to them; I try to befriend them. That's the only way to make change happen. It's hard work and easier said than done," she says as she winds up her household chores and sets off for work.

Our first stop is a village meeting. A crowd of women has gathered and a raucous debate is underway. The topic of discussion is the relative merits of sons over daughters. Many women provide a rationale for wanting male children: "Daughters are expensive to bring up. We need to spend on their dowries;" "Sons earn money, they bring dowries. Daughters only take from their families;" "A daughter gets married and goes away but a son is always there to look after you;" "Raising a daughter is like watering a tree in your neighbour's garden."

Suddenly, a middle aged woman at the back of the crowd pipes up in a robust tone, "All of you who want only sons, can you tell me who will make the babies? Can men give birth to children? We need girls too. Girls are great! Ask me, I have two daughters!" The air is thick with cheering.

But the truth is there is very little to cheer. There aren't enough girls in Haryana for young men to marry. Entire villages in the state are now devoid of brides. Bachelors are desperate, trying everything from propitiating the gods to buying brides from other states and arm-twisting local politicians to get them brides in exchange for votes. 

The practice of female infanticide in India was once widespread enough to necessitate a law against it: The Female Infanticide Prevention Act of 1870. But the law only succeeded in making the killers more furtive, their crimes harder to detect.

What actually worked to practically eradicate the specific practice of infanticide was ultrasound, a technology that came to India in the late 1980s. Ultrasound imaging techniques gave parents the ability to identify the gender of their unborn child in the womb. Gender identification services combined with sex-selective abortions at affordable prices mushroomed all over India. Though the practice of infanticide declined, many more girls actually ended up dead.

In 1994, India passed the Pre-Conception and Pre Natal Diagnostics Techniques Act, which was meant to prohibit sex determination during ultrasound and therefore hypothetically cut down on the number of sex-selective abortions performed in the country. However, the act ultimately proved ineffective. India's ratio of young girls to young boys slid lower every decade. In 2003, an amendment to the PCPNDT Act was passed by government with the intention of preventing the selection of a child's sex before conception. However, the measure has proven ineffective as well: Per the Indian government’s data from its most recent census held in 2011, there are 914 girls under six years-old per every thousand boys. The numbers have dropped further from 1991, when it was 927 girls per every thousand boys.

The problem is so acute that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to address it as a key concern within weeks of taking office in May 2014. In June this year Modi announced a "Beti Bachao, Selfie Banao" (Save Daughters, Take Selfies) contest where proud fathers submitted selfies they took with their daughters.  Quite ironically, the winner of Modi's #SelfieWithDaughter comes from Bibipur, a village in Haryana's Jind district which is so desperately starved of girls that villagers launched a "Give Bride, Get Vote" campaign during the 2014 state elections. 

Singh's experiences speak to this reality from the ground up. "When I got married I learned about sex-selective abortions. It was all around me. It was happening in practically every home. Women were under immense pressure to do it. Many of them were undergoing five, six, even ten abortions in the quest for a son. It's physical and mental torture. I felt very strongly that I should work with women to try and stop the killing of the girl child. It was a calling from deep within."

According to data from the 2011 census, Singh's home of Haryana has only 834 girls for every 1000 boys in the age group zero to six years. The numbers underscore the difficulty of her work as a health and gender rights advocate with a community-based organization called Voluntary Health Association of India. Her primary focus is on women's health and preventing sex-selective abortions.

"Even medicine can become a poison if not used correctly," Singh tells me. "Ultrasound was actually supposed to be used to improve the health of mothers and babies. But society has used it as a killing tool. People are complicit. So are doctors. It's illegal to reveal the sex of the child and sex-selective abortion is illegal too. But it happens all the time. There are clinics that do this everywhere. And it's so much easier compared to infanticide that people feel it's okay."

At the end of a day of trudging from village to village addressing meetings, gathering data, chatting up pregnant women, and encouraging young mothers who've just given birth to female children, it's time for Singh to head home. The sun is setting and there's a cold wind blowing. Her daughter is back from school and has been busy preparing for her mother's arrival. Steaming cups of tea and biscuits await us. Ruffling her daughter's hair, Singh praises her efforts and then turns to me and asks, "Do you have a daughter?"

"Yes," I answer.

"Then," she says, "you'll know what I mean when I say that they are so precious. When I was pregnant for the first time, I prayed for a girl. And God heard me. I love my son too, but my daughter is very special."