By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Mar 4 2004 (IPS)

Married off at a young age to five brothers, Kalki is compelled to provide sexual services to her father-in-law as well because their village in eastern Bihar state is bereft of women, thanks to decades of systematic female foeticide.

Subjected to what amounts to gang rape, night after night, Kalki (the name translates as apocalypse) flees home with the only male who treats her with respect and feeling, Raghu, the family’s low-caste servant boy.

But that only triggers off a murderous caste war, led by her husband on one side and Raghu’s kinsmen on the other, which engulfs the village and destroys it even as Kalki gives birth to a baby girl, the product of continued rape by men warring to maintain rights over her body.

There is little comfort to be had from the fact that Kalki is only a character in an Indo-French feature film set some years into the future. Called ‘Matrubhoomi (motherland): A Nation Without Women,’ the film is due to be released to the public later this month.

Nobel economist Amartya Sen and others have estimated that at least 35 million girls have ‘gone missing’ over the last decade in this country thanks to a combination of deeply patriarchal values and modern methods of determining the sex of an unborn child and having it aborted.

And cases of women being abused in marriage by their husband’s families with impunity are the daily fare of newspapers in this country.

In January, a young woman who was bold enough to tell her in-laws not to expect a bigger dowry than she had already brought allegedly was set upon by her husband and his father, an orthopaedic surgeon, and between them they bit off a finger and a portion of her cheek.

Jyoti Chandra, the young wife, managed to barricade herself in a room but her four-year-old daughter was not so lucky and was sexually traumatised by her father and grandfather. Both mother and daughter needed surgery.

Wife-beating has social acceptance in India and a law introduced in parliament in 2001 to protect women is deliberately vague on what constitutes domestic violence and actually holds that a husband may resort to violence that is ”reasonable for his own protection or for the protection of his or another’s property.”

A study on domestic violence carried out by the International Clinical Epidemiologists Network between 1997 and 1999 suggested that perhaps 50 percent of Indian wives have suffered some form of physical abuse at the hands of their husbands or members of his family.

For decades, women’s rights groups have fought against discriminatory treatment including denial of adequate nutrition, education, healthcare and inheritance.

The 2001 decennial census made the startling discovery that the country’s sex ratio had plummeted from 978 females per thousand males in 1981 to 927 females, thanks mainly to portable ultrasound machines carried into rural areas as a quick and cheap way to determine the sex of foetuses.

Abortions are easy in a country of more than one billion people that is anxious to limit its population growth.

Following the census revelations, the government began measures to halt if not reverse a demographic trend which is already beginning to show seriously negative results in the worst-affected states like northern Haryana, Punjab and Delhi, where in some districts there are now as few as 770 girls per thousand boys in the 0-6 age group.

The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act was brought into force on Feb. 14, 2003, but this only drove the practice underground and many believe that doctors and privately-run clinics across the country make a fast buck disclosing to prospective parents the sex of their unborn child.

Prasanna Kumar Hota, the senior-most bureaucrat in charge of family welfare, has advocated capital punishment for doctors found aiding or abetting female foeticide.

”This is a challenge to the very foundations of our society and it is a shame that doctors are collaborating with this perversion,” she said.

In October, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) teamed up with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Census Commissioner’s office to publish a booklet, ”Mapping the Adverse Sex Ratio in India”, designed to improve public awareness of the problem.

Simultaneously, the government launched a ‘Save the Girl Child’ campaign with Sanya Mirza, India’s junior Wimbledon titleholder who was appointed as the first ‘girl achiever’ to serve as brand ambassador.

Much was also made of the fact that Kalpana Chawla, one of the seven astronauts killed in the Feb. 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, was born in Karnal, a district in Haryana state where the sex ratio has sunk to 871 per thousand males.

Haryana has in recent months seen as spate of Kalki-like cases where women from as far away as eastern Orissa and Assam have had to be rescued by activists from families that bought them to make up for a lack of marriageable women.

”A stage may soon come when it would become extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make up for the missing girls,” the UNFPA booklet warned.

It is that stage in the apparently not too distant future that the film Matrubhoomi portrays so shockingly and so well that it has already won acclaim from international film juries at Venice, Kozlin, Thessaloniki and Florence.

Co-producer Punkej Kharbanda said that the mother and sister of Tulip Joshi, the actress who played Kalki, refuse to speak to him.

”They feel that we made Tulip go through what Kalki goes through in the film and they can’t forgive me for that,” he said.

At a pre-release screening of the film this week, Manish Jha, the film’s writer-director, said his aim was to shock viewers into realising the ”instability which can creep into society form the absence of women – be it physical, emotional or psychological.”

Kalki’s celluloid experiences as the object of a caste war are meant to be a metaphor for the way women’s bodies are used to settle political scores in modern India, which is yet to come to grips with the systematic rape of women during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in western Gujarat state.

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