The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (31 page)

These women are not cowering victims, he insisted. They “are women like you, like my wife and my sister. Empowered, with big cars, big houses, and the best possible college degrees.”

T
here are several reasons for the counterintuitive connection between prosperity, education, and sex discrimination. Wealthier communities in India’s northwest—precisely those who can most afford decent schools for their children—have always been the most averse to the birth of daughters. Members of the urban middle class want smaller families than poor people in the countryside, leaving less room for girls. Those with at least some education are better able to navigate the medical system, especially now that sex-determination tests have become illegal.

Most of all, though, more prosperous families are rejecting daughters because of the toxic, exponential growth of dowries. Dowry has been illegal in India since 1961, but that law is hardly enforced. In theory, dowry is a gift parents give to a daughter to ensure her future security; because she won’t inherit any of her parents’ property, it represents her share of their wealth. As it’s practiced, though, dowry is a kind of tribute paid to the family of the groom. In much of northern India it’s not a one-time gift, either: A girl’s parents are expected to offer a continuous flow of presents to her husband’s family, and to be somewhat abject before them. “In the power relations between the bride’s and groom’s families, the former always have to give in and put up with any humiliation, indignity, and oblique or direct insults on the part of the latter,” wrote Indian sociologist Tulsi Patel.
¹²

In recent years, with India suddenly awash in consumerist bounty, dowry demands have exploded, turning the whole thing into a materialistic free-for-all. In the high-caste communities where dowry had long been established, demands became inflated. At the same time, the custom took hold in places where it had never existed before as the upwardly mobile tried to imitate those further up the caste and class hierarchy.
¹³

Historically, female infanticide was practiced mostly by the upper castes in India’s highly conservative, Pakistan-bordering northern and northwestern plains, which stretch from Gujarat to Punjab, and that is where the problem of sex-selective abortion is most acute. Dowry is out of control in the region. “We have a developing society, and so much consumerism,” said Nirupama Dutt, editor of the Punjabi edition of the
Sunday Indian,
a national newsmagazine. “It’s so important to have the modern gadgets, ostentatious weddings.” Her cousin, she said, from “a slightly backward rural area,” considers the minimum acceptable dowry to include a television, a motorcycle, a refrigerator, and a washing machine, as well as quantities of gold. “This is the done thing,” said Dutt. “Newspapers advertise package deals. And among the landlords, the Jats, a car is a must.”

Exorbitant demands have been spreading from the north to the rest of the country, and as they have, sex-selective abortion has made inroads in parts of India where female infanticide had been unknown. A slight female deficit even appeared among children in the southernmost state of Kerala, where matriarchal traditions and leftist government combined to create a relative idyll of gender equality, with a female literacy rate of almost 90 percent, compared to less than 50 percent in India as a whole.

When dowry demands continue after marriage, a woman can become a kind of hostage in her in-laws’ home, tormented, beaten, and even killed if enough money isn’t forthcoming. In a not atypical story from May 2008, the
Times of India
reported that twenty-four-year-old Astha Jain was found hanging in her South Delhi home on her one-year wedding anniversary, her suicide note saying she could no longer bear her husband’s family’s dowry harassment. The in-laws owned a steel factory; her parents owned a paper business. According to her parents, they had already spent a crore—10 million rupees, or a quarter million dollars—during her wedding, and had given a Mercedes to the groom, Amit Jain, and gold rings to every member of the wedding party. In order to placate Amit’s parents, they had handed over another 35 lakh, or $86,500, a few months before Astha’s death. Their “greed could not be satisfied,” said one of her relatives.
¹⁴

O
n a searingly hot spring day in 2008, Amarjit Singh took me to one of the Fatehgarh Sahib villages where he worked. The people who live there are far from the rarefied realm of the Jains or of Bedi’s patients, but the upper-caste Sikhs’ section of the village has nearly as many modern conveniences as an American suburb. The houses are two stories high, with satellite dishes and designer water tanks shaped like birds or soccer balls perched on top. Behind the gates are courtyards big enough to park cars and John Deere tractors. Here, said Amarjit, there aren’t more than 400 girls for every 1,000 boys. “The numbers look better because of Muslims and migrants,” he said, both groups that have higher birthrates and more females.

Harpreet Singh, a lean, attractive man in white kurta pajamas and an orange turban, shared his late father’s house with his brother, Narpreet. Each of them had one son. Harpreet, whose boy was six years old, planned to stop while he was ahead. “The money that I earn is not enough to raise a girl child,” he said. “I have already got one son, so I don’t want any second child at all.” Another boy would create his own problems, forcing Harpreet to split his share of his father’s land in two. If dowries keep growing as they have been, meanwhile, he estimated he’d have to spend at least 15 lakh—1.5 million rupees, or $37,000—by the time any daughter of his would marry. With one boy he feels assured that his family line will continue and his wealth won’t be dispersed.

“I know my district is famous for having the least number of girl children,” he said. He worries, sometimes, about where his son will find a bride. But no one wanted to spend their own fortune providing wives for Punjab’s boys: As the famous Punjabi saying goes, “Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbor’s garden.” If anything, Harpreet thought that increasing competition for women made it all the more imperative that he invest everything in his only boy. With so few girls, he said, “the time will come when the girls will be choosers in marriage. So in most cases the girls will choose the richer families to be married into. So those who are financially weaker, they will not get brides. That will be a very big crisis in our society.”

Faced with such economic fears, he found official attempts to change attitudes wholly unconvincing. Like elsewhere in India, when people in the village have sons, they decorate their houses and hand out sweets. Usually, there is no celebration for a girl. Lately, people connected to the government and NGOs had been distributing sweets for daughters as well, which Harpreet saw as insincere “showing off.” Deep down, he insisted, they’re as desperate for boys as everyone else.

A
short walk down a brick lane led us to the home of Balwant Singh, a milk seller and practitioner of ayurvedic medicine, and his wife, Gurjit Kaur. They had two daughters, twenty and twenty-two, and a five-year-old son. “I am very happy that I have two girls,” Balwant insisted. “Clinton has only one daughter, but I have two daughters.” Both girls were studying: The eldest, Ranbir, was working on a master’s degree in commerce, and the younger, Satvir, was getting a BA in ayurvedic medicine, like her father.

In the curio case in the small sitting room, though, along with the birds made of seashells, the stuffed dog, and the yellow fabric flowers, there were no photos of Ranbir or Satvir. There were only pictures of little Inderbir, a boisterous boy who ran around the room soaking up attention as his sisters sat decorously to the side or went back and forth to the kitchen with drinks.

“Those people who have only girls in a family, the neighbors think that family is useless,” said Gurjit, forty-four. “I’m thankful to God that I have a son.”

Balwant’s sister, Charanjit, and her husband, Harpreet, a young policeman in a light blue turban, were visiting that day with their only son. They were silent as their relatives and I talked about sex selection until, suddenly, Harpreet’s indignation boiled over. He burst out, speaking Punjabi, “Take a look at Muslim families in other states—they have got nine children, twelve children. Take a look at the girls in this family. One is studying ayurveda, one is preparing for her MBA. These are smaller families, and we are planning them rather well, we think. Whatever is being practiced here, take a look at how we have controlled the population growth.”

Harpreet continued in a rapid soliloquy: “I am a Jat Sikh. I feel bad that people are always blaming us for killing our girl children. We love all our children—we love our boy children, and also we love our girl children. But through this thing, we have controlled our population in such a way that—take a look at our families—we don’t have the kind of poverty that exists in other parts of the country, where they have five children, six children, seven children. They cannot even feed their children, forget about their education.” His son, he said, is studying in the top school in the area. “If I had five children, I couldn’t afford to keep him in the best school.”

Harpreet’s wife was sterilized, and as a government employee, he was rewarded for her operation. Policemen like him who have two children or fewer, and foreclose the possibility of having any more, get an extra five hundred rupees, or twelve dollars, every month. Thus, Harpreet was incensed that his community’s highly successful mode of population control is now under attack.

“The government took such big trouble during Sanjay Gandhi’s time to do all these things,” Harpreet continued, exasperated. “But we are naturally doing it! We are not being coerced, we are not being forced. So what’s the problem?”

For all his passion Harpreet spoke elliptically, avoiding any actual mention of sex-selective abortion, instead calling it “this thing.” Only once, during a particularly heated moment, did he use the phrase
kudi maar,
which means girl killer.

I
ndia’s government has spent the last half century trying to persuade, cajole, and sometimes coerce its population into having smaller families, and they have largely succeeded. In 2005 the country’s total fertility rate averaged 2.9 children per woman, down more than 17 percent in just the last decade. Women in India’s cities average only 2.1 children each. The decline has been felt even among poor people in remote areas. In rural Rajasthan, for example, the total fertility rate dropped from 4.7 in the mid 1990s to 4.0 ten years later.
¹⁵

Son preference, though, has remained unchanged. “Since the desired family size has come down to two or three—two in many cases—they still want
at least
one if not more sons,” said Saroj Pachauri, Asia region director of the Population Council. “That’s where the distortions are occurring.”

Population control, divorced from an appreciable increase in women’s status, replaced one demographic problem with another. “Some things are so ironic when you look back,” Pachauri said sadly, recalling her long history in India’s population movement. “We did this with such good intentions, and it backfired on us.”

A grandmotherly woman with a gentle face, bobbed hair, and a fashionably understated
salwar kameez,
Pachauri has been involved in the movement since the early 1970s; in many ways, its history is her own. She worked at the Ford Foundation’s India office when Adrienne Germain was representing Ford in Bangladesh; like Germain she struggled to make population programs more responsive to women’s rights. “I am absolutely convinced that unless you address the underlying gender problem, you will get nowhere,” she said.

Yet India’s population programs never did this before Cairo, when the focus was on reducing fertility at all costs. While the central government has become much more sensitive since then, some state governments continue to employ punitive targets and quotas, barring people with more than two children from local political office and denying them maternity benefits. Among India’s elite there continues to be near unanimity about the necessity of population control. (As recently as 2003, India’s Supreme Court characterized “the torrential increase in the population” as “more dangerous than a hydrogen bomb.”)

It’s impossible to say how much of India’s fertility decline is due to state policy and how much to increasing wealth, urbanization, and decreasing agricultural plot sizes in the countryside. But the government has almost certainly played a partial role, suggesting that a colossal official mobilization can over time help change social norms. Had the campaign, with all its resources, focused on women’s rights from the start, India’s success in addressing overpopulation may not have come so much at girls’ expense.

Despite the small recent decline in its child sex ratio, Kerala remains a model of what’s possible. Until 1971, Kerala had the highest population growth rate in India, with an average of 4.1 children per woman. By 1992, enormous investments in women’s education, freely available family planning, and comprehensive health care had led to India’s lowest infant mortality rate, all helping to push fertility down to 1.8 children per woman without coercion or, at the time, a decrease in the proportion of girls to boys.
¹⁶
Kerala’s women still both outlive and outnumber its men, although unless current trends are halted, their demographic superiority may not last.
¹⁷

A
s early as the 1970s some predicted—approvingly—that sex selection could be a tool for limiting population. In May 1975, when amniocentesis was first being used for prenatal diagnoses in India, a group of Indian doctors published a report in the journal
Indian Pediatrics
that mentioned the potential of the new method for population control. “In India, cultural and economical factors make the parents desire a son, and in many instances the couple keeps on reproducing just to have a son,” they wrote. “Prenatal determination of sex would put an end to this unnecessary fecundity. There is of course the tendency to abort the fetus if it is female. This may not be acceptable to persons in the West, but in our patients this plan of action was followed in seven of eight patients who had the test carried out primarily for the determination of sex of the fetus.”
¹⁸