“Boy pills” for Hindu mothers

[Rehmat]

Yesterday, Canada’s mass-circulated daily, The Toronto Star, published a report by Raveena Aulakh titled ‘Desperate mothers‘ in which the investigating reporter, posing an expecting mother, confronted a street-peddler in Mississauga, who tried to sell to her a pack of pills for $750 with the assurance that those pills will result (85%) in the birth of boy. She claims that the street-pellar was Kanwar Bains, news editor of a Punjabi-language newspaper, Ajit Weekly.

“In the Indian state of Punjab, the culture is obsessed with boys. Desperate to avoid giving birth to girls, women for decades have taken extreme measures. The swallow herbs, drink pregnant cow’s milk, pray in marathon sessions, and since the widespread use of ultrasound technology, abort female fetuses”.

Young mothers from India, particular from Punjab, often face intense pressure here to have baby boys, said Baldev Mutta, executive director of Punjabi Community Health Services in Peel Region.

Canada is home to more than one million Indian immigrants, mostly Hindus and Sikhs, followed by Christians and Muslims. According to 2006 Census, the boys out-number girls by 1000 to 953.

Though Raveena Aulakh points finger to Punjabi-speaking Indians (meaning Sikhs) – the killing of female children is more spread among India’s Hindu majority than Hindu off-shoots (Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains).

The Punjab province at the time of Indian partition – was divided among India and Pakistan. While the Pakistani part remains intact even today, the Indian Punjab was further divided on November 1, 1966 – into three states (Punjab with Sikh majority, Haryana with Hindu majority, and Kharatehsil and Chandigarh merged into Himachal Pradesh.

India’s journalist Gita Aravamudan in her book Disappearing Daughters, paints a horrible picture of female gender in Hindu culture in India. According to her account – India’s traditional preference for baby boys has resulted in the extermination of generations of females with thousands of fetuses or new-born babies being killed daily for no apparent reason rather than being girls, who are often viewed as a burden because of the matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom’s family. According to Hindu traditions, only a son can light his parents’ funeral pyre.

In the past, India’s unwanted baby girls have been drowned in milk, burned alive in sealedmud pots or fed milk laced with poisonous seeds. But nowadays, they are killed in their mothers’ wombs as technology enables doctors now to know the gender of the fetus in early pregnancy stages. Almost 7,000 girls are killed through abortions every day, according to a UNICEF report.

India has only 927 females for every 1,000 males — far lower than the worldwide average of 1,050 females. In some regions of India, the acute shortage of women has resulted in men buying brides and sharing them with their brothers. Aravamudan’s book tells of Tripala Kumari, 18, whose husband killed her because she refused to have sex with his brothers.

The current discrimination against women-folks in India is attributed to the rise of Hindu extremism. The extremist Hindu organizations (BJP, RSS, Bajrang Dal, Ranvir Sena, VHP, etc.) are reviving the practice of Sati, dowry, infanticide, etc. in various parts of India. Buddism, Jainism and Sikhism were all protest movements against Vedic Vaishnava system. However, none of them lead to any major change in the status of women. Although the Sati was opposed by these reformers, yet women were considered as hurdle on the path to liberation.

Sati (widow-burning) is sanctioned in the Vedas, Puranas, and was practiced by Lord Krishna\’s wives.

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