Marking the day

We may well acknowledge the first International Day of the Girl Child in India – but let’s not dare assume that we have the right to celebrate it

On the 11^th of October the first International Day of the Girl Child was celebrated across the world. In India, too, we had the usual suspects releasing statements, attending functions, organising events to mark the day. But surely the irony of celebrating a day dedicated to the girl child could not have been lost on any of us. Not when more than 500 women have been raped since the beginning of the year in Haryana alone (and that’s just the cases that have been reported); when the figure for women being married off before they turned 18 stood at an astounding 60 per cent in Bihar; and when female foeticide is believed to have killed at least 10 million girls in the womb all across the country.

Yes, the girl child doesn’t really get much of a break in India. If she escapes being aborted, she arrives into a world that regards her as a burden. She is much less likely to finish her primary education than her brothers. She will probably be married off even before she attains majority. And when she gets pregnant, the likelihood of her dying in childbirth is astonishingly high (more than 65,000 women die giving birth in India every year – or, in other words, every 8-10 minutes a woman dies in childbirth), assuming of course that the pregnancy is not terminated because she is carrying a girl child who needs must die before she can born.

And thus the vicious circle continues, sucking each successive generation of women into its vortex of despair.

I know what you’re thinking. Why paint such a bleak portrait of Indian womanhood? After all, there are plenty of women among us who are valued and cherished by their families, who are brought up as valuable members of society, who are educated, who go on to have worthwhile careers, and are both financially independent and socially secure.

Yes, of course, there are. And I number myself among them. But we are the lucky ones, the minuscule minority who were fortunate enough to be born into the right families and the right social class. If it wasn’t for an accident of birth, we could just as easily be among the 35 per cent of women who are not literate, the 47 per cent of women who are married off as minors, the 212 women in every lakh who die in childbirth because they don’t have access to medical facilities, the 7,00,000 girls aborted every year because they are simply the wrong sex.

When you think of the sheer numbers involved – considering that our population stands at 1 billion and counting – it’s clear just how bad things are for women in India.

It doesn’t really matter that we’ve had a woman President in Pratibha Patil or that the UPA is headed by Sonia Gandhi or that the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha is Sushma Swaraj. It is of no consequence that five states of the Indian Union – Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh – have (or have had) women chief ministers (in Jayalalitha, Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati, Vasundhara Raje and Uma Bharati). Or that the world of finance has seen such power women as Chanda Kochhar and Naina Lal Kidwai running large institutions with aplomb. Or even that we have produced such world-class sportswomen as Mary Kom, Saina Nehwal and Sania Mirza.

All of these are achievements that must be celebrated – as indeed they are – but there is no ignoring the fact that these are exceptions that provide a stark contrast to the trials and tribulations that ordinary Indian women have to suffer every day of their lives. And that they mean nothing to the mother living in a remote village who has to trek for miles every day to get drinking water for her family; to the women who have no access to sanitary napkins let alone comprehensive health care; to the new bride who is harassed to death by the dowry demands of her husband and in-laws; to the young girl who is first raped and then told that she ‘asked’ for it; to the widow who is forced out of her family home and sent off to Vrindavan to await death.

And it is particularly ironic that the UN is marking the first International Day of the Girl Child by drawing attention to the problem of child marriages at a time when the khap panchayats in Haryana have announced that girls should be married off at a young age so that they do not get raped (apparently, a mangalsutra also serves as a rapist-repellent in their strange, convoluted minds), a position that was rapidly adopted by such obscurantist political leaders as Om Prakash Chautala.

So, let’s not celebrate the International Day of the Girl Child just yet. Not until we have ensured that every girl in the womb gets a chance at life. Not until we have made the education of every young girl possible. Not until we have made provision for her health care through menstruation, pregnancy, child-rearing and menopause. Not until we have ensured that she gets paid the same wage for the same job as her male co-worker. And not until we have made sure that she has the liberty to make her own life decisions.

Until then, we can mark the International Day of the Girl Child in our calendars – but let’s not dare to assume that we have any right to celebrate it.

Gender bender

We dismiss subjects such as maternal mortality as `women’s issues’ at our own peril

A good friend of mine, Sumita Mehta, recently forwarded some statistics to me on safe motherhood. Or unsafe motherhood, as it should be more accurately described in India, given the high rate of maternal mortality.

Consider the facts. The Maternal Mortality Ratio (MMR) in India is 254 to 100,000 live births, ranging from 95 in Kerala to 480 in Assam. This is the worst MMR in the sub-continent, worse than either Pakistan or Bangladesh. To make sense of this statistic, all you need to know is that in India more than 65,000 women die every year in childbirth. That is to say, in our country every eight minutes a woman dies while giving birth.

A shocking 50 per cent of these deaths are caused by haemorrhage and sepsis, and around 70 per cent of these deaths could easily be prevented by safer delivery methods and adequate maternal care (more than half of India’s mothers deliver without the assistance of any health personnel). As for the children they leave behind, they are ten times more likely to die in the following two years than those with both parents alive.

While these facts are horrific enough, what really troubles me about this situation is that for some reason, this is seen as a ‘women’s issue’. You know what I mean I’m sure. This is supposed to be the kind of soft story that women feature writers pontificate on in the pages of weekend supplements. God forbid that this should actually be treated as a story for the front pages of our newspapers, where it truly belongs. But no, maternal mortality involves women – so it should stay on the feature pages, the natural habitat of all female writers and readers.

What can one say about such appalling sexism except that it beggars belief that it is still alive and flourishing in the newsrooms of national newspapers and television channels?

Think about it for a minute. Just because an issue involves the health and well-being of women, does it mean that no man could possibly have any interest in the subject? Doesn’t the health of a woman affect her entire family? Would not her death impact the men of her family as well, be they fathers, husbands, brothers or sons?

And when it comes to maternal mortality, this exclusion of men from the equation is particularly puerile and foolish. After all, who stands to lose the most when a woman dies in childbirth? It is the children who survive her and the man who is left behind to care for them. Husbands are perhaps the most affected by maternal mortality. And yet, let alone dub it a ‘men’s issue’ we don’t treat death in childbirth as an issue that involves men, even peripherally.

But then, if you ask me, there really is no such thing as a ‘women’s issue’ – or a ‘men’s issue’, for that matter – when it comes to such societal problems. All issues that involve the health and well-being of women impact society as a whole, and men who are part of that social fabric cannot be isolated from them without imperilling our society as a whole.

Take female literacy, for starters. We’ve all heard that old cliché about how educating a girl child means educating an entire family. And like all clichés, it contains a grain of truth. It is self-evident that an educated mother will make better choices about the health and well-being of her family, that she will bring up her children to value education, and that both her daughters and her sons will have a better role model to look up to.

Women’s health is another issue that impacts not just the female of the species but all of society. Anaemia is endemic among Indian women, with 56.2 per cent of women suffering from it. Around 33 per cent of Indian women are malnourished with a body mass index below normal.

Is this really a problem for women alone? Do men not share the responsibility or suffer the consequences?

But such is the conventional wisdom on the subject that issues like these are never given the importance that they deserve. We dredge them out on International Women’s Day or Safe Motherhood Day and give them a hasty airing before shelving them away until the next anniversary rolls around.

Consider the amount of press that has been devoted to the Women’s Reservation Bill and compare it to the attention that the issue of safe motherhood has achieved in the same period. No contest, is there? And yet, safe motherhood affects more people – both men and women – than the Women’s Reservation Bill possibly could.

If we accept that women hold up half the sky, then surely it becomes our duty to ensure that they can stand tall while doing so. Fail to do that and we run the risk of having it all collapse around our ears.

Now tell me if you think that this is a women’s issue. No, I didn’t think so.