In modern-day India, Hindu parents prefer sons to daughters. In fact, parents often bear successive daughters until they have at least one son. Even parents who cannot afford to have children strive to have sons. “'Having a son is deeply inbred in our culture and this cuts across all communities,'” notes a pediatrician in Bombay, India. “'At the clinic we continually have families who cannot afford to feed, leave alone clothe, another child, but will try again and again for a son.'” A 1994 study reveals that in couples who had three living daughters, 66% wanted to try for a fourth child in order to have a son. Fertility rates were clearly lower in couples who already had sons: of those with one son, only 28% wanted an additional child and of those with two sons, only 11% desired a third child (Appendix A). The preference for sons is so ingrained in the Indian culture that in many cases daughters are considered to be of no value or even a liability to the social, economic, spiritual, and political well being of the family. “'One day we had a middle-aged man who came to us. He already had five daughters. That day, male twins were born to him. Unfortunately, they were grossly underweight and their chances for survival were small,'” a pediatrician in Delhi notes. “'The father kept pleading that these were the only children he had and their lives had to be saved, come what may. He was not counting his daughters as his children.'”
Driving and supporting son preference is the problematic intersection between national and personal, or religious, laws in India. Although the Constitution of India guarantees equal opportunity to all citizens according to it Directives Principles, the individual religious laws of its constituency supercede national law. Accordingly, all Indian Muslims follow the social laws of Islam, all Hindus follow Hindu social laws, etc., all of which are defined in writing or are accepted as jus cogensfor members of that religion within India.
Stemming from a social, political and economic patriarchal system, many Hindu religious edicts govern matters in the private sphere, and, often, are the basis of repression for Hindu-Indian women. “Women are invariable losers…All 'impractical' injunctions in the scriptures which have to do with matters of the 'public sphere' like business and politics have been flung to the winds,” notes Ammu Abraham in her presentation to the 1987 Asian Conference on Women, Religion and Family Law. “All the more has religion strengthened its grip in the 'personal sphere' and thus on women's lives.” As Abraham notes, the division between the private and public spheres of life has always been a contentious issue for women's rights as it is a strong factor in the subjugation of women within patriarchal societies. Human rights abuses are more easily rectified in the area of public discourse, populated and controlled mainly by men. On the other hand, human rights issues are not as easily applied to the private sphere, which is most often associated with culture, religious issues, and the home, out of fear of disrupting the sanctity of any of those facets. Unfortunately, women are most associated with the private sphere, and, therefore, their rights are often violated in the name of maintaining culture. Consequently, although national law ideally purports to guarantee the equal rights of Indian women, it is nullified in the face of personal or family law.
Hindu personal law is the key driving factor for son preference as it privileges Hindu males with economic, spiritual, political, and social advantages not equally accorded to Hindu females. The primary advantage endowed Hindu-Indian males is rooted in several key economic factors, all of which are based on the economic security of Hindu parents. As India does not provide its citizens with social security in their old age, parents must depend on their children for economic support. Although Hindu law officially provides daughters with equal access to property under the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, that law is easily superceded by several edicts of Hindu religious law. For example, a woman's access to property is dependent on her father's consent, whereas all Hindu sons have indisputable access to family property. Hindu law also notes that married women have absolutely no rights to reside on family property after marriage. In addition, whereas married daughters are considered to be part of their husband's family and are not be expected to monetarily support their own parents, son are guaranteed dowry payments from their bride's family and will likely increase their parents' economic status.
Son preference is further bolstered by Hindu religious edicts that favor the birth of sons. Many of those laws are based on various Hindu texts, such as the Manu Smriti, dated in the second century AD, which notes, “She is a true wife who has borne a son.” Another ancient text, the Atharva Veda, states, “The birth of a girl grant elsewhere, here grant a son.” Even dharamputra, the Hindu practice of lighting a parent's funeral pyre, requires that rite to be initiated by a son in order for that parent to ascend to heaven.
Although these edicts do not openly condone violence against women, their very language engenders the low value of women and, consequently, violence against them. Even women are culturally ingrained to value their own gender with low regard, as the value of the male gender is tied closely to a woman's social and political power. It is, therefore, in a Hindu woman's interest to produce a son as it will insure her increased heightened social status within her own home as well as in her community. “For women…sons are the primary and frequently the only source of social, economic, and residential support,” notes Desai. “Reproduction ---particularly the birth of a son---is the only means available to women to gain prestige and to legitimize their position in their husband's family,” (Jejeebhoy and Kulkarni, 1989; Karkar, 1978). Inevitably, those laws and biases, in combination with countless others, serve indirectly to reinforce other culturally oppressive aspects associated with the Hindu female, such as the sexual exploitation of young girls (including prostitution, sex trade, incestuous sexual abuse), and sati or widow ostracization. Ultimately, state complicity is not always clearly to blame in a country in which national legislation and jurisdiction is often meaningless. The state, however, is to blame in dire cases in which national law supercedes religious law, such as in the abolishment of sex-selective abortion. Such crimes against women continue as the state does not appear to have the capability to enforce those laws. Whether that failure is due to a lack of resources, inadequate police or judicial investigations, or opposition by religious law is unclear, but must be addressed.
The preference for sons is so strong that the sex ratio in India has been severely skewed. A 1990 study estimates that 300,000 more Indian girls die every year than boys (Appendix B). A 1995 United Nations report observes that around 50 million females are missing from the Indian population. With regard to the fact that India's population has grown over 181 million in the past decade, presently in 2001 the situation is even more dire. India's 2001 census survey notes that the number of girls per 1,000 boys has dropped even further, from 945 in 1991 to 927 at present.
The skewed sex ratio reflects the detrimental influence of Hindu personal laws on the lives of Hindu-Indian women. Indeed, Hindu personal and religious laws have resulted in gross violations of women's human rights in all aspects of their lives and at every stage of their lives due to their gender. This analysis will present an overview of the most outstanding social, political, and economic women's rights violations resulting from son preference in modern-day India, namely the sex-selective abortion of female fetuses; female infanticide; the malnutrition of young girls; child and early marriage; dowry issues and dowry burnings; and issues of illiteracy.
The discussion points noted above violate basic human rights accorded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), particularly the crux of Article 1 which states that, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” In this analysis it will become clear that even among Hindu-Indian women who are aware of and who have access to those rights, many are unable to recognize those rights due to challenging life situations. Without support systems in place to enable women to change their lives of their own volition, many have no choice but to remain in violent and abusive situations.
Furthermore, it should be noted that many Hindu-Indian women do not even have the ability to access their basic human rights. Although the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976) places a positive obligation on the Indian government to provide all of its citizens with equal access to their human rights and to self determination, as noted in Article 1, Part 1, this is clearly not the case. This is important particular with reference to the violation of the Indian female's sexual and reproductive rights. In their study, “Reproductive and Sexual Rights: A Feminist Perspective,” Correa and Petchesky relate the realization of human rights to the availability of power and resources to women. It is this availability that allows women to make personal and informed decisions about fertility, childbearing, child rearing, gynecological health, and sexual activity safely and effectively. Correa and Petchesky note that without those enabling conditions, women's social rights to realize social welfare, personal security, and political freedom, are meaningless.
Lacking knowledge of and access to their basic human rights, many women cannot even imagine having a life other than that dictated by patriarchal society. “Gender-based violence emerges as a primary human-security concern for women,” note Bunch, Carillo, and Shore in their paper “Violence Against Women.” “As a crucial development challenge…[it] shrinks the range of choices open to women and girls, limiting not only their mobility and their control over their own lives, but, ultimately, their ability to imagine mobility and control over their lives.” This, it appears, to be the most profound tragedy perpetrated against Hindu women in India, as it locks them into their oppressive lives and forces them to undervalue their own gender, with little hope for change.
Sex-selective abortion and female infanticide are methods by which parents selectively abort or murder their female offspring, respectively. The former, which requires money, is carried out in more affluent and urban households, and, therefore, it can be assumed that the latter takes place in less affluent and rural areas. Despite a 1996 national law outlawing prenatal sex determination, the root cause of sex-selective abortion, female fetuses continue to be aborted every day in alarming numbers. Interestingly, this is a situation in which Hindu religious laws support the national ban on abortion and, in fact, explicitly forbids abortion altogether. The Krishna Yajur Veda notes, “A slayer of an embryo is like the slayer of a priest.” Clearly, the Hindu public's lack of attention to that edict lies in the immediate and overriding messages sent by conflicting pro-male Hindu religious laws. No longer is sex-selective abortion a matter of spiritual legalities, but of social, economic, and political needs.
The effects of pro-male religious laws have staggering effects on sex-selective abortion. In her text, India: Gender Inequalities and Demographic Behavior Sonalde Desai notes that 78,000 female fetuses were aborted between 1978 and 1983 (Kelkar, 1992). A recent article in the New York Times notes that despite strong public disapproval of sex-determination testing, those tests and abortions are still carried out on a regular basis. Doctors who perform illegal tests deny their complicity while openly advertising the tests. Many billboards in India encourage the use of those tests, noting, for example, that, It is better to pay 500 Rs. now than 50,000 Rs. [in dowry for the girl child at marriage] later. It is difficult to ascertain statistics concerning female infanticide as this practice is carried out in remote areas and, it is assumed, never reported.
Gender-based abortion is a problematic issue in which two equally valid, yet opposing, human rights arguments collide. On one hand, one must account for the rights of the mother to preserve her bodily integrity. It can be argued that a Hindu-Indian woman, as other women, should have unmitigated access to abortion and the right to determine the circumstances governing her choice to abort a fetus, regardless of its sex. On the other hand, the rights of the female fetus not to be aborted on the basis of sex should be taken into consideration as well. Activists and analysts disagree with sex-selective abortion in particular as they regard it as one of a gender-specific violation. They avidly argue that it is the responsibility of the state to protect the rights of those who do not have the ability to protect themselves.
The resolution to this issue, therefore, lies in analysis rooted in basic human rights. A solid approach is to decipher whether the underlying argument that Hindu-Indian women provide in favor of sex-selective abortion is indeed valid. In light of the violence against women in India, should the decision to abort a female child be considered solely as a personal choice or as a socially reinforced necessity? Until these issues are further argued and discussed thoroughly, the gender ratio of India will continue to be skewed.
The low provision of health care and nourishment for young girls is, perhaps, the most difficult to regulate and uncover. Initially, the difficulty lay in the inability to clearly ascertain whether a girl child was neglected on the basis of her gender or because of the poor circumstances of her family situation. The reality, however, is that if girls were to have equal access to the same resources of health care and nutrition as boys under extreme cases of poverty, they would have a similar level of mortality to, if not higher than, their male counterparts. “In societies where males and females receive similar treatment, females live longer than males,” notes Neera Sohoni in her text, Status of Girls in Development Strategies. “When resources are a constraint, and access costly in terms of money, time, transport, or other opportunity costs, the gender bias takes over, and works pre-eminently to the advantage of male over female (adult or child).”
As Sohoni implies, India's skewed sex ratio indicates that female babies and girls are, indeed, exclusively denied equal rights to nutrition and healthcare as compared to their male counterparts. UNICEF statistics from 1986 illustrate startling trends of this gender-discriminate behavior in varying locales of India. A study in West Bengal reveals that it is three times more likely that malnourished girls (age, 7-8 months) will be kept at home rather than given medical care in comparison to boys of the same age. Another study in a South Indian village observes that healthcare provided for first-born girls is 35% that provided for their male counterparts. That same study notes that almost no money was spent on girls who were not first born (UNICEF, Ravindran, 1986: 10-11). In addition, girls and babies are severely undernourished. Girls are breast-fed for shorter periods of time, given fewer calories, and suffer from malnutrition (leading to death or to mental or physical disability) more than their male counterparts. It should be noted that this bias against girls continues into their adolescence, before the girl is married. Sohoni notes that this neglect is mainly evidenced by disregarding the needs of the adolescent female psyche, body, and growth cycles, all of which have a profound affect on an adolescent's physical and psychological well being, hence, her survival.
Clearly the biases discussed in this section violate Part 1, Article 1 of the ICESCR, which states that, “In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of survival.” Taken as a collective segment of the Indian population, all Hindu-Indian girls and babies should be guaranteed equal access to available resources in order to sustain life. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This human rights violation is, perhaps, the most problematic of all against women in India as it is less apparent than dowry burnings, and is, therefore, less easily remedied. The argument for state complicity is, again, problematic in this situation as these biases against girls are deeply rooted in Hindu-Indian culture and are recognizable as those of jus cogens within the Hindu-Indian community. State jurisdiction in this situation, therefore, will likely produce minimal or no positive effects.
Although the Special Marriage Act of 1954 fixes the national legal age of marriage at 21 years for males and eighteen years for females, again, the jurisdiction of Hindu personal laws, allowing for marriage below eighteen years age for girls, takes precedence. Circumstances cause many girls to be married at an extremely young age, ranging from those in the single digits to late teens, depending on the social and economic status of the family. By comparison, Indian men are married at much later ages, as noted in Appendix C. Desai cautions that even the figures noting the age of marriage for women in Appendix C are not completely accurate, as census takers do not reflect marital information for girls below the age of ten years.
Despite the prohibition of child marriage by the Child Marriage Restraint Act in 1929, many females continue to be married even before the onset of menstruation. In a text entitled The Lesser Child: The Girl in India, the Indian government notes: “Parents, anxious to wash their hands off their burden [their daughters], marry their daughters young. In families where there are two daughters, they may be married off together to save the expense of two separate ceremonies, even if the younger one is well below the legal age of marriage.” Violation of the national law is further reinforced by several additional Hindu personal laws that affect the female's ability to be economically self-sufficient, to maintain control over her own sexuality and reproductive capacities, and to improve her power within her husband's family.
A primary cause of early marriage is Hindu women's inability to be self-sufficient economically. As discussed earlier, although national law may endow women with equal inheritance rights, Hindu family and personal laws make this very difficult. Consequently, marriage for Hindu women appears to be their only survival strategy as they have little other access to economic security. Alternatively, as men need not rush to marry, or even marry at all, men, and their families, ultimately have the upper hand in choosing prospective spouses. This economic paradigm causes a marked unequal power dynamic between prospective brides and grooms and is the groundwork that supports a series of human rights abuses against prospective Hindu-Indian brides. For example, men and their families may manipulate a prospective bride's family in terms of soliciting a dowry, or a bride price, as the only means of securing a marriage for the bride. Despite the outlawing of dowry requests in the Dowry Prohibition Act, grooms' families continue to claim exorbitant dowries, many times exceeding one year's salary. Clearly, the abuse of the dowry system renders the bride's family financially and socially vulnerable. The paradigm, in turn, causes many families to regard their daughters as liabilities, and to regard sons as prosperous to the family, often termed as 'blank checks.' Madhu Kishwar, Editor-in-Chief of the women's grassroots magazine Manushi explicates the further intricacies of the dowry system. Families who request little or no dowries, she notes, are considered low-class. In effect, a low dowry reflects a worthless son and, thus, parents will always demand a higher dowry for their sons.
In addition to the economic factor, early marriage allows for social control over the female's sexual and reproductive capacities. Sohoni notes that the main purpose of child and early marriage is to maintain social control over the young girl's virginity. The Indian culture, based on shame and honor, denies women, more so than men, sexual experience before marriage; therefore, when a girl is married she is expected to be a virgin. Securing marriage for girl at a young age will likely guarantee her virginity. Also, after the onset of puberty, a girl's value is based on her ability to conceive. Early marriage, therefore, will likely guarantee a bride's increased levels and length of fertility.
In order to bypass extreme dowry manipulation, parents marry their daughters off at a young age. Younger brides are considered more valuable as they are likely to remain fertile for a longer period of time, to be a virgin, and to remain subservient within the family. As they are more highly valued than older women, grooms may demand a smaller dowry for a younger bride.
Tied directly to the issues surrounding early marriage is the lack of literacy among many young and adolescent girls. Although the Indian Constitution requires states to provide free and compulsory education to girls up through the age of fourteen years, the literacy rate for Indian women is quite low. A 1991 study notes the overall literacy rate of women to be 25%, reaching 40% at primary levels and 39% in middle school in 1991 (Appendix D). In 1991, female literacy rates in Northern India reached 25% and 48% in the remaining large Indian states. Many girls remain uneducated as the gender roles they are expected to fulfill take precedence over any other life priority. Consequently, because of her gender, it is far more valuable for a girl to be educated in domestic activities, which will allow her to secure a groom. In addition, many girls are withheld from attending school as male classmates and teachers are perceived as threats to her virginity.
The lack of education, of course, purports to the human rights violation of young girls, mainly because it has been proven that education can help women to mitigate violence against them perpetrated by their gender. The link between education and female worth, compounded by son preference, is illustrated by the fact that in the southern state of Kerala, with the highest female literacy rate (72.2% in urban areas and 64.3% in rural areas), has “the lowest infant and overall mortality rates, highest expectation of life at birth, the highest average age at marriage, and the lowest birth rate.” Sohoni notes, “Education has intrinsic value for women. It is supposed to enrich her, add to her self-awareness and self-esteem, and open up options for her outside of her gender roles of daughter, wife and mother.” Sohoni's comment inevitably points to the violations that many women face when they are deprived of formal education. Withholding education from girls not only deprives them of their constitutional right to education but also presents a serious infringement on their right to govern themselves and to self-determination. Without education, it can be construed that Hindu-Indian girls will not have the ability to even imagine a better life.
The reasons underlying early marriage appears to be a socially perfect web, except for the fact that the needs of the daughter herself are completely ignored and her rights violated. Besides reneging rights of girls to choose their spouses or even consenting to marriage, child or early age marriage also eliminates the possibility of literacy for girls, and, consequently, any ability to gain economic self-security. Early marriage also eliminates the rights of women to maintain control over their sexuality and reproductive capabilities. In addition, early marriage hinder a woman's ability to even imagine her own happiness or voicing her own concerns, especially within her husband's household. All of these factors contribute heavily to the oppression of the girl child and, sadly, continue the cycle of spiritual and economic desire for son preference, even for women who are subjugated.
In marriage, a Hindu-Indian woman is expected to follow specific gender rules accorded by the Hindu religion. “Virginity before marriage, monogamy and faithfulness to husband even beyond his death were rules for women,” notes Abraham. “In fact, faithfulness was not sufficient; the husband had to be worshipped.” Indeed, Hindu laws require women to subjugate themselves to all male relatives within the family, particularly to their husbands and sons. The Manu Smriti notes, “In childhood, a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, or sons; by leaving them she would make both (her own and her husband's) families contemptible,” (chapter V, vs. 149). Furthermore, the Manu Smriti punishes women who violate their duties of submission, even in the next life, noting that, “By violating her duty toward her husband, a wife is disgraced in this world (after death) she enters the womb of a jackal, and is tormented by diseases (the punishment of) her sin,” (chapter V, vs. 165). The obvious intent of the scriptures is to diminish the power of the Hindu wife so that she will have little desire or ability to rebel against any oppressive situations she encounters within her marriage, especially those resulting from son preference. In fact, the verses seem to reinforce her blind acceptance of son preference within Hindu society, even to her own detriment and to that of her daughters. Not surprisingly, Hindu laws regarding son preference have resulted in several human rights violations against women in regard marriage, as follows: the expectation of producing sons; extended dowry control; and dowry burnings.
As soon as she is married, a bride is expected to produce children, especially sons. Combined with early marriage practices, the result is that 10-15% of all births in India occur in adolescents alone. “Marriage was meant for the production of sons, who were to save their fathers from hell. Women were needed only for that,” observes Abraham. “Towards this purpose married couples were exhorted to have regular sexual relations…If a wife did not produce sons, she could be superceded. . Clearly such attitudes have led to the high fertility in India rate and, indirectly, to the increased mortality of prospective mothers.
Even as women strive to produce sons, their own needs are often neglected. A 1996 report notes that one out of eighteen Indian women is likely to die during pregnancy, and that the number of Indian women who die because of complications due to pregnancy in one week is equivalent to that of women Europe in the course of one entire year. Most of these violations are due to neglect of medical care and nutrition. Despite the legalization of abortion in India in 1971 through the Maternal Termination Pregnancy Act, many women do not have access to safe abortions. Consequently, women who opt for abortion may also face serious complications and a high level of mortality. A 1995 study published by the Population Council notes that 15,000-20,000 deaths occur annually mainly among married women. “One overwhelming fact about the 570,000 maternal deaths that occur each year: nearly all of them are avoidable,” notes Lynn Freedman in her study, “Using Human Rights in the AMDD Program: From Analysis to Strategy.” “That fact---the avoidability of these deaths---is why maternal mortality is also an issue of human rights.”
With regard to high fertility rates, it has been suggested that Indian women, if educated, would automatically take it upon themselves to reduce their number of pregnancies if possible. Their miseducation, therefore, is considered a human rights violation. That is a valid argument in one sense, however, the fact is that even when educated about contraception, many Indian women continue their pattern of fertility and conception because they often have no other choice. Even among adolescent wives, aged fifteen to nineteen years, no more than 8.6% were using contraception.
In marriage, a wife is also likely to be confronted by one or more violations of her bodily integrity, mainly in the form of dowry control or, in extreme cases, dowry burnings. As discussed earlier, dowry is the price offered by a bride's family to a groom's family in order to secure marriage for the bride. Ideally, this price is concretely agreed upon before the marriage and the debt is usually settled before marriage or a payment installment plan is created. The reality is that, however, in many cases, the groom's family may use the dowry factor as a means of gaining additional money from the bride's family. Before a marriage, a groom's family may falsely claim that the dowry was not paid or may threaten to stop a marriage unless additional dowry is paid. After marriage, the groom's family members may decide that they are dissatisfied with the original dowry and may begin to demand more, using the bride's well being and her reputation within the community as a means of coercion. Inevitably, the bride may be indefinitely harmed physically or emotionally until the groom and his family are satisfied.
At the extreme, but not rare, end of the dowry control issue lies the incident of dowry burning, in which unsatisfied grooms or their families murder the bride, usually by fire. Note the following example:
For 20-year-old Asha, marriage was hell. Her in laws, she wrote in impassioned letters to her father, berated and beat her and once spiked her milk with pesticide in an attempt to kill her. Finally, according, to her father, just after her third wedding anniversary, her husband's family gagged her, beat her unconscious and electrocuted her with a live wire. They bundled her bloody body in a quilt, tossed it in the front yard and called her father to say she was unwell because of an accident.
Many bride burnings are enacted in the kitchen, allowing the groom's family conveniently to attribute the death to suicide or to a careless daughter-in-law who may have killed herself accidentally while cooking. By murdering their brides, men can again search for new marriages and renewed dowry payments from additional prospective brides.
In the past decade, violence due to dowry issues has severely increased. “In an era when India is enjoying unprecedented economic advances and boasts the world's fastest-growing middle class, the country is also experiencing a dramatic escalation in reported dowry deaths and bride burnings,” notes Mary Moore in a 1997 article in the Washington Post Foreign Service. “The rise of this ancient practice has been fueled by the intersection of the new age consumerism and Hindu tradition dating from medieval times.” One New Delhi police report notes 6,200 dowry-related deaths in 1996, which is an 170% increase from the previous year, and that an average of seventeen brides are killed every day due to dowry issues. Still another 1995 report notes that a woman dies every two hours because of dowry issues.
At the crux of the dowry factor is the equation between money and the value of women. For the groom and his family, dowry represents upward social and economic mobility. For the bride's parents, dowry is only a liability and can ruin a family. Equating women with dowry only drives home the low value of the Hindu female, both to her and the community, so that she is treated as a commodity rather than as a human being with rights.
Although these issues may be blatantly apparent to us in the Western world, these levels of oppression are a way of life for most Hindu-Indian women. The reality is that most Hindu-Indian women are simply not in a position to leave their marriage, to refuse marriage, or to refuse the expectation to bear sons, as any one of these acts would most likely result in social ostracization. All of these human rights abuses are rooted in a wife's low power within her husband's family, all of which hearken back to the preference for sons. Consequently, Hindu-Indian women are tragically doubly displaced and repressed: while striving to satisfy society's desire for sons, they exchange their rights, whether consciously or unconsciously, to self-preservation and happiness.
Clearly, the issue of son preference presents a serious and immediate threat to the well being of Hindu-Indian women. The web of human rights violations spun from this issue alone is ominous and each facet is layered so heavily on the other that each violation cannot be viewed, let alone treated, separately. Thus, to address the issue of child marriage requires one to address the issue of dowry. To address the issue of maternal mortality and morbidity, one must address the issue of religious son preference.
As this evaluation illustrates, at the heart of this web is the dominance of religious and personal law over national law. Although the logical remedy is insure the automatic domination of national law over religious law in cases of violence, this conclusion is not easily recognizable due to the religious make-up of Indian society. Religious autonomy is a contentious issue in a country that houses citizens of almost every religion, from Hinduism to Islam to Christianity. Citizens of each religion, both men and women, perceive the sovereignty of civil law, above religious law, as a threat to the sustenance of their culture and religion.
Although in some cases cultural relativity may appear to be a valid argument, when the basic human rights of thousands of Hindu-Indian women are violated everyday, the argument loses credibility. This hearkens to the contention between women's human rights and cultural preservation and begs the question: at what point is the international community responsible for interfering with and for subverting cultural norms with regard to human rights? In the case of violations against Hindu-Indian women with regard to son preference, it is this study's contention that this intervention is long overdue, especially as Hindu-Indian women appear to be in the act of extermination from Indian society.
Since effective change has not proven successful through legal reform, an alternative solution to the problem may require a multi-faceted and intersectional approach in which the needs of each Hindu-Indian woman and man are addressed on an individual basis, according to their social, economic, and political situation. This solution will take into account additional factors of oppression that are specific to varying and disparate social and economic classes. For example, Hindu-Indian women of the lower castes may have additional and varying needs as compared to Hindu-Indian women of the highest social castes. By addressing the needs of each segment of society, reforms can be enacted on a realistic basis with the needs of individuals in mind. This approach has proven successful in AMDD's (Columbia School of Public Health) approach to the Indian health care, in which healthcare workers, as well as pregnant women, are educated about the need for and benefits of adequate health care facilities for society.
Another manner in which to effect change is mainly to focus on empowering the Hindu-Indian woman herself. One route of empowerment is to educate Hindu-Indian women in terms of her basic human rights while, and this is critical, allowing them the access to realize those rights and providing them with the economic and psychological support to break out of their oppressive situations if they so desire. Perhaps through that education, women will choose to effect changes in their lives or in those of their immediate female relatives. Another route of empowering women lies in monetary support. Through the successful establishment of the Gramine Bank, Muhammed Yunis provides loans to many poor Indian women so that they may be economically self-sufficient. In addition, as Lynn Freedman noted, women can be empowered to think for themselves through formal education. Even two years in a formal educational institution has proven to have positive consequences on women's value for and perceptions of themselves.
In the end, regardless of which remedy is applied, real change can only be enacted by respecting and empowering the individuals who are the victims. Son preference is, indeed, a web of restrictions, all oppressing the status and value of Hindu-Indian women. At the heart of the web, however, is the Hindu woman and she should be the focal point for change. By respecting Hindu-Indian women and empowering them, they will gain a sense of value for themselves apart from society and will be more open to believing that they can better their lives.
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Rajan 1.
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Desai 49.
Dugger.
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Sohoni 66-7.
Sohoni 65.
Bunch, Carillo, and Shore 63.
Sohoni 69.
Martin and Carson 19.
Desai 37.
Desai 39.
Singh 64.
Desai 40.
Desai 38.
Singh 63.
Sohoni 30.
Desai 40.
Rajan 6.
Rajan 10.
Sohoni 29.
Desai 40.
Desai 25.
Sohoni 97.
Desai 39.
Desai 39.
Sohoni 97.
Sohoni 97.
Abraham 3.
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