A provisional report based on the findings of Census 2011 indicates that Jammu and Kashmir has registered the steepest decline in child sex ratio in India in the last decade. There are 859 girls for every 1,000 boys in the age group of 0-6 years at present, a sharp drop from 941 girls in 2001. The 2011 Census has pegged the state’s overall sex ratio at 883 females per 1,000 males. This indicates a cumulative drop of nine percentage points compared to the figure 10 years ago.
I visited three districts in Kashmir recently — Srinagar and neighbouring Shopian and Pulwama — to look for the reasons behind these alarming statistics. I had chosen the three districts because their performance in arresting the slide has been as dismal as eight others in the state. Srinagar, which had 928 girls under six years of age in 2001, now has 869. In Shopian, the figure has fallen from 1011 to 883, while in Pulwama the number of girls has decreased to 836 from 1046. I wanted to explore whether there are newer ways to interpret and address this persistent problem. (The state health minister, Sham Lal Sharma, revealed that a comparative analysis of census figures since 1901 confirmed that the child sex ratio in J&K has continued to fall over the last century.)
While interviewing Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the chairman of the Hurriyat Conference, the contours of a newer template — disturbing but only partially convincing — for the analysis of female foeticide began to unfold. The mirwaiz, young, dapper and Kashmir’s top spiritual leader, seemed to suggest that the state’s pathetic child sex ratio figures were the manifestation of a deep moral crisis, one that has been wilfully created by the sinister Indian State. He readily provided evidence. India has flushed the Valley with money: real estate is booming, gleaming departmental stores crowd Lal Chowk, dowry is fairly common and Kashmiris are now eager to lead an ostentatious life. But this craving for material comfort has brought in its wake a way of life alien to Islam. This moral contamination has encouraged parents to kill unborn girls.
There was more. The militarization of the state — apart from the regular army and a sizeable paramilitary force, J&K is also managed with the help of the heavily armed military police numbering a lakh — has also resulted in a fear for the safety of girls. Nearly every village and town I visited had bunkers manned by grim-faced men holding sophisticated weapons. Although unIslamic, female foeticide was considered to be a better option than losing a girl to a soldier’s bullet.
The increasing marginalization of a moderate strand of Islam, the mirwaiz added, had exacerbated the problem. The conservative streak in Kashmir’s politics is self-evident: Syed Ali Shah Geelani — who is revered for his vituperations against India — has usurped the mirwaiz’s position as Kashmir’s messiah who will deliver azadi. What is equally worrisome is the radicalization of the spiritual ethic. (For instance, the Wahabis are more popular than the Sufis.) This, the mirwaizargued, had made it easier to kill girls. As a visitor from ‘Hindustan’— the identification of India with the dominant faith weighed heavily on my mind — I had found the mirwaiz’ssuggestion of India debasing Kashmir’s moral fabric incredible. But his views on the weakening of moderate Islam and its possible consequences for foeticide were tellingly revealed for me during my meeting with the village headman of Tukhroo in Shopian. The ageing, handsome man, with a regal air but vacant eyes, has five daughters. The eldest has been married off after a payment of Rs 60,000, and the rest go to school. Tukhroo, with a population of 11,000, has four primary schools, a college seven kilometres away, a lower drop-out rate among girls, but several illiterate women panchayatmembers. The headman — surrounded by two women who sat swatting flies that buzzed over his lunch plate — said that Islam permitted women to take up jobs, but forbade them to take decisions, be they political or private. It was the only time I saw the fire return to his eyes.
The mirwaiz also expressed the urgent need to fight female foeticide. Religious conferences are being held to sensitize Muslims, brochures denouncing the evil have been sent to every mosque in the Valley, and the induction of women into faith-based decision-making committees is being debated. Before I left, he reminded me that azadi would be incomplete if there were no place for women in it.
The day before, at a cafeteria dimly lit by twilight descending on the enchanting Dal Lake, I had met another man who claimed to be fighting foeticide. Saleem-ur-Rehman, the director of health services, is located at the opposite end of the spectrum: he is a member of the State that the mirwaiz loves to admonish. Unlike many other bureaucrats, Rehman seemed to possess energy and foresight. Literacy, he said, is an important tool, but that alone is not enough to prevent the death of girls. His view echoed a recent Lancet report, which, after having analysed population data and records of nearly 250,000 births between 1990 and 2005, had found a marked increase in the selective abortion of girl children in India’s literate and affluent households. Rehman emphasized that education should be supplemented by institutional support. Surprisingly, he was candid about the various institutional inadequacies. For instance, The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation & Prevention of Misuse) Act, which came into effect in Kashmir as late as 2006, allows a person to practise ultrasonography after six months of work experience. Government records show that, lured by monetary benefits and the promise of an expanding client base, these inexperienced, less-reputed practitioners are often guilty of indulging in sex-selection tests. Apart from legal loopholes, political interference also prevented conscientious bureaucrats from penalizing the guilty. A woman doctor who was apprehended in Handwara had evaded punishment because of her political connections. Finally, the State’s disbursal of welfare is city-centric. This was confirmed by the health minister’s admission that not enough doctors are willing to visit villages, thereby limiting the scope of monitoring.
Fifty-four clinics in Kashmir and 24 in Jammu have been shut down. But Rehman conceded that effective administrative intervention, coupled with education and social awareness, would not be able to check the deaths of girl children unless religious leaders — imams, maulvis and the mirwaiz himself — took a more strident stand. “Instead of railing against India, why doesn’t Mirwaiz Umar Farooq ask the people in his Friday sermons to refrain from foeticide?” asked Rehman as we trudged past the placid lake.
In Kashmir, female foeticide cannot be understood simply as a social malaise. Entrenched religious and cultural factors — dowry, the centrality of Islam to people’s lives — and a violent struggle for self-determination have complicated the issue. A deterrent to such a tiered and complex practice can only be devised if the State, which commands considerable resources, were to work closely with religious leaders, such as themirwaiz. The irony is that given the mutual antipathy, it will take a small miracle to bring the mirwaiz and Rehman to the table. This confirms, yet again, how disruptive political situations often lead to the creation, and then the obfuscation, of dangerous demographic imbalances. Can foeticide then be imagined as a natural extension of the general violence that is taking places in states along India’s faultlines? What else explains the rise in female foeticide in ‘disturbed’ areas such as Kashmir or even in the Northeast?
In Kashmir, the dream of azadi and the retaliatory efforts to kill the dream have consumed the resources and energies of both the State and the people. It compels the mirwaiz — a rational and intelligent man — to imagine India’s hand in the inception of a materialistic culture that imperils Islam’s purity and acts as a catalyst for a myriad social ills. Fear of the same dream clouds the vision of the State and its servants, causing them to prioritize politics over social problems. Funnily enough, the call for azadi itself is not uniformly insistent. Urban Srinagar, while not in love with India, is happy with the tourists and the sizeable economic aid. (This year, the Centre has earmarked Rs 6,600 crore for J&K’s development, in addition to the Rs 1,200 crore that is disbursed under the Prime Minister’s Reconstruction Programme.) The cry for freedom, unlike in the villages of Shopian and Pulwama, seemed far more muted there.
A strategy to check sex-determination tests must also take into account the centrality of Islam in the people’s lives. I came across several people — leaders, students, city people, villagers — who doubted the census figures and argued that since Islam prohibits foeticide, such a thing was a product of the State’s imagination. This mode of denial confirmed themirwaiz’s suspicion that the space for introspection and dialogue — integral to the moderate Islamist tradition — is being encroached upon by a culture that has ceased to question orthodoxy. To save unborn girls, the revival of moderate Islam is a must, and leaders such as the mirwaizhave to share the responsibility of resisting conservatism.
Tied to this is the issue of according women a greater role in decision-making processes — over their own bodies and their children. In Kashmir, I spoke to many people about sex-selection but not one was a woman. My search for a womanpanchayat member proved to be equally futile. Travelling through villages such as Tukhroo and Largam, I was told by respondents, all men, that the government had forced women to contest the recently-held panchayat elections to fulfil the criterion of 33 per cent reservation. None of the men was ready to give the names of these women for fear of militants who, allegedly, killed a woman panch in Budgam. Women cannot be kept outside the discourse on foeticide. But for that to happen, the State would have to create conducive conditions for women to participate in the dialogue.
I had referred to the people’s denial of foeticide earlier. The denial is a reflection of a culture of deception and duality that seems to be ingrained. The headman of Tukhroo, a vociferous supporter of women’s education and employment, is aghast at the notion of men and women being equal. Many men who had spent last summer pelting stones at security men did not think twice before joining the police later. This unpredictable streak in the people, an important reason behind the trust deficit between the State and its own people, makes it difficult to discount the census figures.
Finally, there is the State and its myopic policies. Thepanchayat elections, which ended on June 18, could have been utilized to spread the message against foeticide. But the deaths of unborn girls was not an issue; candidates only sold promises of bringing water and electricity to villages. Given the fact that the state government is yet to begin capacity-building exercises for elected sarpanchs and panchs — yet another instance of an elitist State unwilling to devolve power to grassroots institutions — one can cast credible doubts on thepanchayats’ ability and willingness to take on foeticide. There is also the uncomfortable silence regarding the role of the army in this matter. Kupwara, Leh, Kargil, Poonch, Rajouri — among Kashmir’s 11 districts that have witnessed the sharpest drop in sex ratio — are teeming with armed forces. Is the government reluctant to employ the army in the war against foeticide, given it notorious human rights record in the state?
On a road near the mirwaiz’s house in Srinagar, I came across a poster put up by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. It was a montage of faces of men — a few looked like teenagers — who have disappeared. Girls, some less than six years old, are disappearing too. But not many Kashmiris are willing to talk about it. The Valley— guarded by the mountains — has yet another secret to keep.
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