When we talk about a religion going back 5000 years, we quite rightly expect the religion to have advanced to catch up with the current times. One would normally also expect the population to have grown to huge numbers which of course is depending on the religion itself too up to an extent.
Historically tribes and nations have needed men for the protection, and women to take care of the family life. Hindus also follow this tradition, but traditionally there has been a huge preference for baby boys, instead of baby girls. Although this preference has existed in almost all societies, and traditionally other societies have tried different methods to have baby boys instead of girls, ranging from different diet, different sleeping positions, and praying etc. But Hindus seem to have taken it to a "different" level and taken nature’s matters into their hands quite literally!
There are THOUSANDS of baby girls being "murdered†on DAILY basis in Modern India today. According to the UNICEF report regarding this matter, there are around 7000 baby girls disappearing EVERYDAY in India. This is one of the most horrific facts about HINDU dominated India. A whole gender is being exterminated so quietly that even most of the neighbours of these cruel parents are unaware of this ill practice.
“We are slowly becoming a prostitute economy. We can treat foreign patients but deny basic healthcare to our own people,†said Punit Bedi, a renowned doctor and activist for the cause of women.
Aravamudan has written a book, "Disappearing Daughters", about the gruesome practice in the Hindu-majority country, including stories of women forced to endure successive pregnancies to produce male children and of others forced to have up to four abortions in five years.
"Female infanticide is akin to serial killing. But female feticide was more like a Holocaust," Aravamudan writes.
My own grand mother who is still alive, worked as a midwife all her life, and has a huge experience in this field. She has worked as a midwife for many years prior to partition too. Being from a Sikh family, she knew the importance of having men in the family, but at the same time, being a woman, and a mother of two girls (and three sons) she already appreciated the importance of having girls in the family too. She says "boys are the arms of the family but girls are the heart". She has herself told us quite a few stories she heard from other midwives working in the same town.
Although she refused to take part in any of these sickening methods, she was very well informed of what went on. Traditionally she says the baby girl would be killed straight after birth by suffocating them by pressing in the centre of the neck, or by simply closing the nose etc. She remembers quite a few cases in Hindu families around, where "dead" girls were born, and no one pointed a finger ant any one, but almost every one knew of this practice. Not all families followed these sickening practices, but she says it was pretty "normal" to have a dead baby girl while she remembers almost no baby boys being born "dead".
Some of the other gruesome methods used in the older times also included drowning in milk, burned alive in sealed mud pots or fed milk laced with poisonous seeds. These horrific acts were performed by mostly the parents themselves, and sometimes by paid midwives, who were mostly Hindu, and valued money more than life.
Above experience doesn't seem like the only one, see below:
"One of the most disturbing revelations came from a midwife who said she had killed hundreds of newborns," journalist Gita Aravamudan told Agence France-Presse (AFP) in an interview wired Friday, July 20.
"She had lost count…"
But Nowadays, in the "INCREDIBLE" India, technology has advanced, and baby girls are not being suffocated, burned alive in sealed pots, or poisoned. Now the baby's sex can be confirmed during ultra sound as early as 20 weeks, and doctors can predict the sex even earlier than 3 months which is when most women start to show growth.
The British medical journal The Lancet has put the loss of females at 10 million over the past two decades.
"With technology making it easier to find out the gender of a foetus in earlier stages of pregnancy, these numbers will only increase," said Aravamudan in his book, "Disappearing Daughters".
Apart from many reasons already understood by many around the world, Hindus traditionally consider girls to be a "burden" on the family, who will "consume" bread of the family but will not be bread winners. Also a son is supposed to light his parent’s pyre (cremation).
Treatment of Hindu Mothers and their feelings for their new born:
The cultural preference for boys leads to further neglect of girls who do survive to birth, the UN report said.
“After birth, son-preference continues to persist, leading to the neglect of girls and their lack of access to nutrition, health and maternal care in the critical early years,"
Traditionally Hinduism considers women as sex objects purely for male pleasure. They live a very oppressed life under Hinduism. For example the main features of chaturvarnya as elaborated in the "Manusmriti" include:
- Shudras as well as women of dwija varnas are denied the right to get education.
- Treating women as unequal. Women, that is, even women belonging to Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya varna are not entitled to upanayan and the study of the Vedas.
- For them, marriage is equivalent to upanayan and service of their husbands is equivalent to the study of the Vedas in the gurukul.
- Even when the husband is morally degraded, engaged in an affair with another woman and is devoid of knowledge and other qualities, the wife must treat him like a god. Please refer to this ancient Hindu picture of men helping himself to a female donkey, while his woman stands besides him, hiding her face. Also it is ironic to notice another man standing naked towards the front of the donkey in an unexplainable way.CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS PIC
- A widower is allowed to remarry but a widow is not.
- Women are not considered fit for being free and independent. They should never be allowed by their guardians to act independently.
- A woman must never do anything even inside her home without the consent of her father, husband and son respectively.
- She must remain in control of her father in childhood, of husband in youth and of son after the death of her husband.
- The varna-vyavastha is most unfair to the Shudras and the untouchable women. They are denied respect, knowledge, power and wealth. They are denied access to occupations considered respectable, just as they are denied access to men of upper varnas for marriage.
- A majority of Hindu marriages are still within the caste and very few Hindu women actually claim or get a share in father's property.
While the living and grown up Hindu girls are subjected to the above practices and worse, during their lives, it doesn’t come as a surprise that they agree to killing their own daughters. Many Indian women are infact more than determined to abort them if they find their foetus is a girl to spare her a nightmarish life that they have had to "live".
"Better to send her straight to heaven rather than make her endure this beating and kicking around," one woman is saying in Aravamudan's book.
Others said they are simply are overpowered by their husbands.
"What do you want from me? What power do you think I have over my womb? None," said another woman. "Do I have the right to decide if I can keep the child if it is a girl? No."
The problem has been so widely practiced that it has created a shortage of women to marry. This has pushed the society to even buy women. In some cases women have been forced by their husbands to share their beds with other men such as husband's brothers etc.
Aravamudan's book tells of Tripala Kumari, 18, whose husband killed her because she refused to have sex with his brothers!!
Steps taken by the Indian govt:
To stop the gruesome practice, India has introduced tough laws against tests to determine foetal gender for non-medical reasons, but the practice is widespread and shows no signs of slowing. Wealthier populations are the worst offenders, since they can afford the cost of testing for gender identification. In such a corrupt society, the rules are widely flouted by doctors for a small amount of bribe, in what activists say has now become a multi-million-dollar business. The tests are done secretly and are often hard to prove.
This ill, inhumane practice carries on at its peak as the wealth and prosperity grows, in what is now known as “Incredible India†. It is a true shame to all human kind, and sadly makes us worse than animals.
