The Path of Female Extermination in India

By Indira Guerrero

No one knows where the missing girls of Mahima’s village are, except Mahima herself. She crushes the lice from her son Aditya’s hair with her fingernails, knowing that the last time she saw one of those girls—her own—she was leaving her womb as the abortion of an unwanted daughter.

As for the others, no one knows.

Girls are missing in the remote village of Mahima in the state of Rajasthan, in the neighboring town, in the north of the country, across all of India. Yet no one looks for them. They are not known. They have no names. Most are dead or were never born.

During the last 30 years, millions of girls in India have vanished without a trace or died before turning six, under the suspicion of having been ripped from the womb before birth, murdered, sold, abandoned, or made to disappear by their own parents.

The cost of raising them has made the life of girls unviable.

Sitting in her office in the exclusive neighborhood of Lodhi Estate, the base for modern international organizations and government complexes in New Delhi, a United Nations official draws a diagram of the sectors of society involved in the disappearances and explains why no one should look for the lost girls.

“If you look closely, this line passes through these girls’ families, the Government, the Police, hospitals, the economy. Everyone is in on this and no one cares,” she says while tracing a line that connects the names in a dead-end circle.

Reports of newborns with broken necks within hours of birth, poisoned milk, or suffocation with soaked sheets revealed the extermination of girls taking place in India in the late 1980s.

In 1991, the national census triggered all alarms. Official data revealed that there were 927 women for every 1,000 men in the country—when the global average is 952 girls for every 1,000 boys—surpassing the most pessimistic forecasts.

Over the years, the brutal deaths seemed to disappear thanks to the implementation of programs where volunteers monitored pregnant women until delivery, or cradles installed in hospitals so parents could leave babies without providing details.

“If your baby is a burden, leave it here,” read a sign painted on the wall of a shelter in the state of Andhra Pradesh, on the southern coast of the country.

Reports of murdered babies became less frequent, but the female population continued to decline, revealing a new reality—families had found a new way to make girls disappear.

The arrival of ultrasounds in India initiated a new, much finer and more accurate sex selection system, ideal for large-scale female slaughter.

Thus, the 1991 census showed that there were 4.2 million fewer girls than boys aged 0 to 6 in India. The situation worsened in the 2001 census, when the difference was six million, reaching 7.1 million in the latest 2011 census, according to the Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR) in a study published by The Lancet.

The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs also published the 2015-2017 birth registry in 2019, the most precise sex ratio study in the country until the 2021 census is published, and the data was not encouraging—896 girls for every 1,000 boys.

The selection against girls has spread across almost the entire country. Last July, birth records in 132 villages in the Uttarkashi district, about 300 kilometers north of New Delhi, exposed the effectiveness of the killing. Of the 216 babies born in three months, all were boys. Not a single girl.

Blood of My Blood

What killed Mahima’s daughter was a mixture of mifepristone and misoprostol, two medications available on the market. One is known as the “morning-after pill” and the other is a treatment for gastric ulcers.

Half an hour after swallowing the pills, Mahima felt blood running down her legs and the contractions began.

“It was a female, and I wanted a male,” says Mahima, protected by the privacy of her mud hut, built next to her father-in-law’s on the hilltop over which the village extends.

Dark-skinned and lean, the 26-year-old woman has bloody fingers from the gutted lice from her son that stick to her hands. She does not repent.

In a corner of the one-room house, where light does not enter, are her two eldest daughters, aged 8 and 10. They listen to her while eating a piece of bread on the floor, unaware that the reason they are alive is simply that they were born first.

Mahima is convinced that the sex of babies is determined by a pattern configured in every woman’s reproductive system. In her case, she has verified that “boys are born after having two girls,” she assures. That is why she aborted what would have been her fourth child, convinced it was a female.

Although the use of ultrasound is permitted to examine fetal development, the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act of 1994 prohibits revealing the sex of the fetus to families or soliciting that service, with penalties ranging from three to five years in prison for repeat offenses.

However, the enforcement of the law exposed a new niche, a powerful and clandestine industry. Doctors or professionals experienced enough to read ultrasounds began charging sums between 200 and 300 dollars under the table in exchange for a signal, a gesture, or a tiny mark on the edge of the prescription to reveal the sex of the fetuses to the parents.

The safest route to eliminate a girl in this village involves walking 10 kilometers, hopping onto a tractor trailer to the city, and going straight to the hospital.

“Why do you want to do this?” asked the doctor when Mahima entered the consultation requesting an abortion.

“Because we don’t want to have girls,” replied the woman, who swears the doctor did not examine her to corroborate that her baby was indeed a girl. In exchange for 600 rupees, or about 8 dollars, he gave her the prescription to obtain the abortion pills.

Although the doctor suggested continuing the pregnancy and handing the girl over to the hospital once born, her daughter’s future was something she did not want to leave in anyone’s hands. The news of shelters that prostitute, sell, or enslave girls was an idea that tortured Mahima more than death itself.

“But how was I going to hand over my daughter? I refused, I told them I couldn’t abandon her. She is blood of my blood,” she recalls.

In the Name of the Father

If one had to mark the houses where at least one girl disappeared, one would also have to point to Mahima’s neighbor, Amisha, the wife of a farmer with two oxen and half a dozen goats, distinguished by everyone in the village for his relative economic comfort.

She is seen three times a day outside the house, when she takes the goats to graze, or when she goes out to collect water from the hand pump installed in the middle of the field. Her stretched neck moves with the momentum of the 30 liters swaying on her head.

After carrying the last two jugs to wash the dinner dishes, she will have earned the right to do whatever she wants, which is often nothing more than detangling her son’s hair.

Her son Ajay’s long, almost golden mane is a promise—one made to the gods if her family was blessed with a male, a dauphin for the legacy of this peasant family, one who can light the path of death for his father.

In Hinduism, the male son—or the husband in the case of a woman’s death—is necessary in the cremation rite to achieve redemption.

Amisha’s responsibility for her family’s lineage is much greater than Mahima’s. Being married to the only son of a farming family, having at least one male was the only way to ensure her husband’s lineage and the salvation of his soul.

The farmer’s wife had two boys, with three girls interspersed. Only the first two were born. The last one remained in an old rag that contained the blood of the abortion caused by the same mixture of mifepristone and misoprostol that Mahima obtained at the public hospital in the city.

“Yes, I did it,” Amisha answers with a half-smile when asked if she got rid of the last of the girls.

Her husband closed the deal with the doctor to provide the medications in exchange for 14 dollars for each month of pregnancy. She was three months pregnant.

If a wife is unable to provide male children “she has to leave the house,” return to her parents, so the husband can marry again and try to continue the lineage, explains Amisha, referring to an unwritten rule she calls “marriage pressure.”

“My husband had no brothers,” she repeats over and over to explain the troubles of her life.

While daughters leave home to live with their husbands, sons are traditionally destined to stay home with their wives and children, caring for their parents and family assets.

Having only girls would mean the extinction of the family.

The Price of Daughters

“Raising a daughter is like watering the neighbor’s garden,” dictates a popular Indian saying that points directly to the dowry system, the payment parents make for their daughters’ marriages.

Ironically, women are the repositories of family honor, and the dowry is a display of social status that, in turn, allows parents to choose from the best suitors and households to which their daughters will belong.

The politics of dowry, present especially in Hindu families regardless of social status, is clearly one of the main reasons why girls are viewed as a burden from birth, the rearing of a future debt.

“I gather half, and the rest we borrow from our relatives. When another woman in the family marries, I will have to give money to pay back what they gave me,” Mahima details to explain the workings of a system banned and punishable by law since 1961, but which remains common practice for most marriages.

There is no stipulated amount; it depends on family status. In poor villages like Mahima and Amisha’s, the bidding can start at 1,500 dollars in the form of livestock, jewelry, property, or land.

Incomplete payment of the dowry, and pressure for more money from the groom’s family, occasionally opens another door to death.

The most recent report from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which collects data from 2015, revealed that in that year 7,634 women were murdered in the country over dowry-related matters.

That same year, the bureau reported 42,088 suicides of women, 1,801 of them linked to dowry and 3,915 more for other marriage-related issues.

“Of course the dowry must be paid, otherwise what man is going to accept marrying a daughter,” reasons an old woman who has been left alone after handing over her only daughter.

Water for Girls

“The water is to blame,” says an elderly woman from the village, who knows that girls are more likely to die if the land is not fertile.

With the decrease in rainfall, families are left at the mercy of hydraulic pumps that barely cover elementary needs, and the lands await the arrival of the monsoon rains that once a year cover the fields in green.

The rest of the year, men leave the village to find work in the city or as day laborers in areas with irrigation systems, while villages like this one remain inhabited only by women who are forbidden to go to work for fear they will be kidnapped or flee in search of a better future.

Some can go out for a few hours “if they prove they are loyal to us,” says Amisha, who although she aborted a girl, has another 12-year-old, the eldest of her children.

A higher number of men also guarantees that during droughts households secure enough money to survive.

“If we had at least one water well, women could work at home growing vegetables, and fathers would have no problem having more daughters,” argues Biju, Mahima’s father-in-law.

The peasant, about 60 years old, is the community leader and knows the problem of the girls well, not only because he suspects that several granddaughters have died in his daughters-in-law’s wombs, but because he lost his own daughter. Pregnant with a girl, she died after her husband decided to deprive her of medical treatment, believing that birth complications would kill only the baby.

Biju is missing a leg, amputated due to gangrene. He does not work, but he has five sons who, as custom dictates, will care for him until his death.

Unlike what happens in this village, fertile lands are what allow a life prosperous enough to have daughters.

Many districts have seen that prosperity arrive in the last decade thanks to government-funded irrigation systems.

But far from being a solution, it seems to have worsened the problem. The sons of green lands began demanding higher dowries to accept marriage proposals coming from arid zones, making it increasingly difficult for women, explains the author of Disappearing Daughters, Gita Aravamudan, who has followed the clues leading to feminicide for years.

Bride Trafficking

When the 2001 National Census data was published, Hasina was on her way to Haryana, an agricultural state located north of New Delhi with the worst sex ratio in the entire country—861 women for every 1,000 men. A number that in the case of children under 0 to 6 years dropped abruptly to 820, when national data showed 933 girls in general and 927 among those under 6 years.

After leaving her native state of Assam in northeast India, her arrival in Haryana was a direct consequence of the census numbers.

Both she and several girls from her town began arriving in Haryana with the aim of supplying the lack of women to become wives.

All were girls from the poor states of Bihar, Assam, or Bengal whom Hasina refers to as “the trafficked sisters.”

Faced with a shortage of women, families began paying anyone who could bring one—anyone—from neighboring states.

Necessity opened a new market, that of bride trafficking in India.

Hasina cost her husband 12,000 rupees, about 170 dollars.

“I bought you. I bought you the same way I would have bought a buffalo,” her husband screams at her in every fight to remind her that she is nothing more than a “paro,” a “molki,” which can be freely translated from the regional Haryanvi dialect as “a bought woman.”

“Paro” was the first word she learned in Haryanvi.

Her husband had not been the first buyer. She arrived in New Delhi at age 12 by the hand of an “intermediary,” a man who convinced her he would take her to the capital for a trip and that her parents had given permission.

“By the time I realized, we were already in Delhi,” remembers the 32-year-old woman, taking advantage of her husband’s trip to town for shopping to give a secret interview to social workers from the Indian NGO Empower People, dedicated to combating bride trafficking.

But even though the door is open and no one stops her, for her there is no turning back. You cannot rescue a “paro,” she says.

In fact, her father found her 15 years ago, but since she was already married, returning home would mean dishonor for the family. Furthermore, she would have had to marry again, this time to a man for whom she would be worth much less.

Rekha is also a “trafficked sister,” arriving from the western state of Maharashtra 30 years ago. She forgot Marathi, her mother tongue, and replaced it with the Haryanvi learned after her husband bought her.

Her father sold her to an intermediary after her first husband abandoned her following a fruitless, childless marriage.

Although she knows she is a “molki,” Rekha claims she was “happy” with her husband, so when she was widowed, she lost her reason for being.

She was left alone and childless after spontaneously aborting all her pregnancies, and now she just waits for time to pass.

Rekha has scars on her arms, legs, and abdomen, the memory of her husband’s family tractor that ran her over shortly after she was widowed. They didn’t need her anymore.

“It is good to buy a bride if a man needs her. If it weren’t so, what would have become of me?” explains a Bangladeshi woman who was bought more than 20 years ago to care for a sick old man in Haryana.

The Bangladeshi woman was kidnapped by a family friend who used to visit them to watch television, and who sold her for 6,000 rupees, about 80 dollars. This saved her life, she says.

At that time she had been widowed and was five months pregnant, a state that could have condemned her to live in misery. “Who knows if my life would have been better or worse,” she reflects.

The Survivor

At the main crematorium in Bareilly, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, it was six in the evening when a cry began to be heard coming from the earth.

At that hour the workers had already left, and Babu Ram, the crematorium guard, asked a local resident, Aakash Kumar, to dig a grave so a couple could bury their stillborn baby.

“I was digging when the shovel hit a clay pot and then we started to hear the crying,” says the impromptu 17-year-old gravedigger next to the small, still-open pit.

In that place, death is not strange. With a dozen cremation pyres that had incinerated several bodies just hours before, the young man could only think of spirits that could not find rest.

The couple thought of the corpse of their daughter in their arms, but no, it wasn’t their girl. The crying came from the earth, from that clay pot so small it fit in a shopping bag.

“When he pulled out the shovel and dragged out the bag with the pot, the crying started again and the boy ran away,” recalls the guard.

“It was a baby girl,” explains the guard, who opened the pot and found a girl who barely weighed 1,200 grams.

Crimes against children happen with some frequency, admits a police chief who did not want to reveal his name. “Just a week ago we found a dead baby inside a toilet,” he adds while searching his mobile for photos of the most recent crimes.

The Police have gone several times to the embankment behind the cremation pyres where the baby was found. “Maybe we are walking on others, you never know,” says a curious onlooker accompanying the officers during one of the visits.

The place is easy to recognize because the pieces of the pot remain.

“As long as we don’t know who the mother is, it will be difficult to know why someone did this,” says one of the agents.

“I think she was buried alive because she is a girl,” says Aakash, who does not need a police investigation to understand the roots of feminicide in India.

After two weeks in the hospital, the nurses have started calling her “Baby Sita,” like the selfless wife of the god Rama, one of the main female figures in Hinduism.

One, two, three, four, five, Doctor Ravi Khanna repeats up to four times as he counts the times he applies and rubs the antibacterial gel to sterilize his hands before lifting the plastic covering Sita’s incubator.

“She is a fighter. According to my estimates, she was underground between two and a half and three days,” says the pediatrician, explaining that the baby was able to survive under almost a meter of depth because oxygen remained accumulated in the pot and the girl remained in a state of semi-hibernation, “like a bear.”

“The miracle” was that she survived without water—”she is strong.”

The doctor rules out the selection of males and assures, while reviewing the twenty or so incubators with the nurses, that there “are children of both sexes.”

“Although, wait,” he corrects himself, “well, at this moment, yes, Sita is the only girl.” EFE