The morning today was particularly stifling; the bad tea and morning
news made it worse. They were flashing
the news of the minor girl who was raped in Durgapur because she refused to get
married to the local mobster. The reporter on the Hindi news channel took
immense pleasure in informing about his find, that this was not for the first
time that a case had been witnessed for forced marriages of minors in the sates
of West Bengal, Jharkhand and Bihar.
This took me back to a visit made recently in one of the districts
of Jharkhand where incidentally I came across a case of young girl of the age
14 years who was a mother of two at the age and had, had a spontaneous abortion
earlier. She was brought in to a community health center for health checkup of
the 8 months old child, who looked more like a chipmunk suckling her mother’s
sunken breasts. The other girl lingering around her mother wasn’t so good in
the build as well; mud-beplastered hair and dirty torn cloths weren’t the first
things that I noticed common in them. All three of them, with lusterless hair,
pale skin and undernourished stature drew the medical officer’s attention at
once.
He informed that this wasn’t the first visit she has made to the
health center; but she doesn’t abide by the prescripts. She’d go missing by
evening and will never continue to take the medics or follow the feeding
instructions given by the doctor.
As the medical officer got busier with his humdrum paperwork; I got
a better chance to interact with the 14 year old mother of two. She was irksome
at first and tried to avoid questions, she knew answering the question will do
her no good. It was then the peon got me a carton of fruity, the only thing
which was still cold in the desolate hamlet. I offered it to the little girl,
the gleaming reflection of the yellow pack in her lackluster eyes; she got what
she had yearned for in days.
It was then the mother broke into tears and told that she belonged
to a village in Orissa, from where she was brought here by a close relative so
that she could avail the benefits of the “right to education” but instead was
given away to a man in return of some money. She told that she wasn’t married
but has no option as now she has the responsibility of these two children. “Either
I kill them both and then run away to someplace else, where I’d be sold again
or I stick to my man and keep on living the same way”, I shuddered when I heard
her words. She told that since she has two children, the local nurse had
suggested that she should get the sterilization operation done, but every time
she is brought to the health center even for medication of the kids; her
husband fights and takes her away. She is threatened, that the only thing she
is worth of is producing kids, if that too is taken away; the first thing he’d
do is to abandon her to die.
This picture painted here is very different from the Balika Vadhu
screened with highest TRPs. There are several other Balika Vadhus
who are being ignored and left to exist in wretchedness of their lives. I tried
to bring this to the notice of block level officials of department of women and
child development. The only advice I got was, “if you look after nutrition I
think you should stick to that, entering into other politically sensitive
arenas is not prudent”. I really felt incapacitated.
With all these news articles being flashed about child marriages,
girl trafficking, rapes and domestic violence; the only question that comes to
my mind is that what is good we are gaining of the raising GDP or per capita
income, if we are still unable to respect and elevate the women population from
there substandard level. It rages in my head that are women only so meek only
because they can give birth. Is this a blessing or a bane? A woman being
considered as “tools for reproduction” brings out the autocracy where
everyone wants to seize control of the means of production and reproduction.
This is time to stop looking at them as a commodity; it’s time for
that another war for freedom is need of the hour. Equality is not a concept.
It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. “Equality is
like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the
misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It
is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul
of every man and woman who's confronted with it.”
www.bellbajao.org
www.bellbajao.org
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