by SOMA WADHWA
IMAGE/Google
With hefty dowry demands in caste-ridden Bihar, over 1.6 lakh female infants are killed in the state every year
The rates are fixed. A local dai in katihar is paid Rs 100 for the delivery of a son and Rs 25 for a daughter. If the daughter is killed, the fee goes up to Rs 50.
“Yes, we kill baby girls for a pittance, says Adila Devi, a midwife in this eastern district of Bihar. “Poor people like us cannot protest. Many a father has been known to refuse us payment after we have killed the daughter, but who do we approach for justice?” Having helped deliver babies in the Teja Tola, Fasiya Tola and Budhuchak areas for over 40 years now, the sexagenarian midwife claims to have “done away” with more than 150 infant girls.
Adila’s confession shocks no one in her Chamar basti. Most women in the basti earn their livelihood as dais. Most admit to having murdered unwanted baby girls at birth. And their tone is almost matter-of fact while discussing the large-scale killing of female infants in the area. “I have killed over 65 infant girls in the past 10 years as a dai,” says Phool Devi. In her early 40s, this benign-looking grandmother says she has never questioned her client’s order to kill a daughter. “Niyam hain yahan (It’s the practice here),” she explains.
For generations, female infants in the interior districts of Bihar have been routinely killed before they have seen the light of day outside the saurighar (delivery room). The methods of killing are as simple as they are varied. The baby girls are usually strangled with a length of rope. Sometimes the dai snaps the spine by bending it backwards. A handful of fertiliser pushed down the baby’s throat also does the job. A lump of black salt placed in the newborn’s mouth, experienced dais say, takes an hour to kill the infant.
The less-experienced midwives, however choose to suffocate the baby by stuffing her into a clay pot and sealing the lid with fresh dough. The baby dies within two hours. “This way one doesn’t actually have to see the baby dying,” Phool points out.
For, witnessing an infant’s death can make even the most experienced dai shudder, she says. “Strangling makes the tongue hang out and urea makes her eyes bulge. It’s a ghastly sight–even the most hardened of us cannot sleep for days after the deed is done.
It is not so much the act but the aftermath that seems to haunt the midwives. “The fear that some wild animal might drag the infant carcass out of the undergrowth where I have dumped it makes me break into cold sweat,” says Seema Devi. Most dais in the area, she adds, dispose of the bodies in the nearby Kolasi ghat and Chaumukhi stream. “It torments me to think that I have deprived so many souls of last rites,” she murmurs.
But Phool is quick to pin the “sin” on the father of the child. “We hardly have any choice in the matter,” she argues.
Adila agrees, saying that the instruction to kill the child usually comes from the patriarch of the family. As soon as the baby’s sex is whispered to the father, and it is a girl, he orders the dai to kill her. Refusal to carry out the order would mean risking violent retribution.
“I won’t pretend unusual courage,” says Bhagni, a dal from the nearby Manihari area. “Irate fathers threatening to skin me alive can make me kill and not even a hysterical mother can change my mind.” She recalls the pitiful pleas of a mother whose infant she had been ordered to kill three weeks ago. Even as the mother cried for her first-born daughter’s life, her husband threatened to smash the child’s head against the wall. And yet another saurighar death occurred in Bihar.
Significantly, these unreported deaths carried out by the Chamars are an upper caste malaise in caste-ridden Bihar. The superior status of the Rajputs, Bhumihars and Brahmins in society finds expression in demands for hefty dowries. And intrinsic to the dowry system is a bias against the female. Girls are seen as “burdens” that must be “offloaded”.
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