As originally published in:

Editorial Section, 17 May 2012 Thursday, p. 4, Gangtok-edition


DISTRESSED EVES: RECONSIDERING THE POSITION OF INDIAN FEMALES

13 May 2012 Sunday arrived and was over and the world celebrated ‘International Mothers’ Day’ yet once agin. Begun in 1908 in the United States of America, the second Sunday of May is being celebrated each year as a recognition of motherhood. Indirectly, the day is also a celebration of the essence of femininity. However, in the 21st century, the question has arisen to haunt us: are we really giving the females their due recognition? More importantly, do we give the women, whom we revere as mothers, the very chance to survive? If anything, they increasingly seem to be Indian Eves in dire distress – of survival, growth and development.

With his maiden episode of ‘Satyameva Jayate’ on 6 May 2012, the Indian actor Aamir Khan has touched a raw nerve in Indian societal discussions. The ‘Himalayan Mirror’ has finely covered its aftermath. Aamir Khan has not only explored but also substantiated the grievous state of female foeticide in our country. The experiences of Amisha Yagnik from Ahmedabad, Parveen Khan from Morena, and Mitu Khurana from New Delhi, who were invited on stage during the show, have something in common – they have all been physically or mentally abused for conceiving female child in opposition to their in-laws’ or husband’s wishes. We are one of the faster growing economies of the world, an electronics’ giant, a major military power, the world’s largest democracy, and yet, sixty-four years after the independence, the Indians are yet to change their attitude towards their own females. We are still an overwhelmingly-patriarchal nation. We are still killing one million female children a year, through foeticide and other means, to bring down the sex ratio to 914 in the previous year. Interestingly, females outnumber males in the whole of North American continent, most parts of South America, almost the whole of Europe, Australia, southeastern Asia, and even in more than half the countries of the impoverished Africa. Only in some of the south Asians countries – and, sadly, India is among them – the situation is exactly the opposite. These countries cannot shake off their responsibilities in bringing down the 2011 international sex ratio down to 984 females against a thousand males.

Crimes against Indian women are continuing and even increasing. As ‘National Crime Records Bureau’ estimated in 2011, India has 60 registered rapes a day. Many women are generally reticent to report ravishment, and yet the reported cases are so high. Even in the national capital of New Delhi, one girl is reportedly molested in every 14 hours. However, even more heinous than these crimes is the deplorable task of denying the female child the right to be born. In spite of several preventive measures having had been taken by both the central and state governments, biased parents and unscrupulous gynaecologists are still carrying on secret termination of pregnancies, usually of the female foetuses. Thought such incidents are gradually declining, statistics reported underneath reveal that the murderous crime is yet to be thoroughly controlled.

Not every Indian state, however, is at fault. 2011 government sources reveal that sex ratio is either encouraging or near-satisfactory at Kerala (1084 females per 1000 males), Puducherry (1038), Tamil Nadu (995), Andhra Pradesh (992), and Chhattisgarh (991). On the other hand, among the worst-hit states with a pitiable sex-ratio, are Daman and Diu (618 females per 1000 males), Dadra and Nagar Haveli (775), Chandigarh (818), and New Delhi (866). For other Indian states, the 2011 average sex-ratios were: Haryana (877), Andaman and Nicobar Islands (878), Jammu and Kashmir (883), Sikkim (889), Punjab (893), Uttar Pradesh (908), Bihar (916), Gujarat (918), Arunachal Pradesh (920), Maharastra (925), Rajasthan (926), Madhya Pradesh (930), Nagaland (931), Lakshadweep (946), West Bengal (947), Jharkhand (947), Assam (954), Tripura (961), Uttarakhand (963), Karnataka (968), Goa (968), Himachal Pradesh (974), Mizoram (975), Odisha (978), Meghalaya (986), and Manipur (987). Between 2001 and 2011, the child sex ratios have identifiably dropped in states like Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, and West Bengal. The eastern Indian states having had been culturally most protective of girls, the imbalance in sex ratios in these states has become a matter of even concern for public health activists.

In the first issue of the first volume of “International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences” (January 2006), Snehalata Tandon and Renu Sharma had given well-researched statistics regarding female foeticide and infanticides in different states of India, including Sikkim and West Bengal. In the beginning of the 21st century, both Sikkim and West Bengal fared high on anti-foeticide drives and the number of female foeticides remained nil in both the states. Three cases of infanticide in Sikkim were reported during the period, with two in West Bengal. In Maharastra, however, the reported number of female foeticides was the highest – between 41 and 45 – followed by Madhya Pradesh (between 14 and 15), Haryana (13-14) and Andhra Pradesh (8-9). The number of infanticides in these four states was respectively 20, 31, 1, and 8. Tandon and Sharma, like numerous other Indian sociologists and statisticians, agree that for foeticide and infanticide, female-children are specifically targeted. Other than counselling of and vigilance on prejudiced parents and increased reporting in media, the sociologists argue that strict enforcements of anti-foeticidal and infanticide laws with harsher penalties than ever could be effective in normalising the Indian sex-ratios. Legal measures like ‘Hindu Marriage Act – 1955’, ‘Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act – 1956’, ‘Dowry Prohibition Act – 1961; amended in 1986), ‘Immoral Traffic Prevention Act – 1986’ have already been passed to change the situation, and with the maintenance of ‘Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act – 1994’ since January 1996, the situation is expected to be hopeful with consciousness on the average Indians part. People need to understand that the female children are boons not banes. Not only they grow up into sensitive human beings, but also they often leave marks in every socio-cultural and scientific field. Parents need to celebrate the fact that they are guardians to females who would obviously make them proud through intelligence, education, beauty, and sensibilities. Thanks to documentary shows like the one Aamir Khan hosted, millions of conscious Indians are being increasingly forced to rethink their patriarchal ideologies. Only then can ‘Mothers’ Day’ be celebrated more successfully than ever.

– Reported by: Pinaki Roy; Balurghat

From the original report published in:

Editorial section, 8 May 2012 Tuesday, p. 4, Gangtok edition


Remembering the Bosnian War Twenty Years After

The late-April 2012 sentencing by the ‘Sarajevo War Crimes Tribunal’ (S.W.C.T.) of Rasema Handanovic (39), a former member of the ‘Muslim Forces’ of Bosnia, to five-and-a-half-year-imprisonment because she participated in the massacre of twenty-six Croatian civilian and military-prisoners in the village of Trusina, Herzegovina, in April 1993, has received widespread media coverage, and has rekindled popular memories of the ‘Bosnian War’ twenty years after it was initiated principally with a confrontation between the Serbian forces and the Bosnian Muslim civilian population – the Bosniaks – in eastern Bosnia. The war officially continued from 5 April 1992 to 14 December 1995 in south-eastern Europe on the Balkan Peninsula and concluded with the internal partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in accordance with the ‘Dayton Agreement’. The belligerence, which was the worst in Europe since the 1939-45 Second World War, killed approximately a hundred thousand people while displacing over two million.

The Bosnian War was a complex phenomenon, initially (1992-94) marked by an uneasy alliance between the three states Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, and Croatia, which were p0itted against Republika Srpska, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia. In 1994-95 occurred a realignment between the belligerents with ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ (N.A.T.O.)-forces joining the united armed forces of Croatia and Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to bomb Republika Srpska and A.P. Western Bosnia into submission. Whereas the First and Second World Wars have had been chronicled in millions of authentic and elucidating historical works, general readers, especially in India, scarcely have well-documented records of one of the more important internal events which tested the interrelationship among different southern European ethnic groups. The Bosnian War, which would see reported ethnic cleaning and genocides by both the Serbs and Croats in their respective territories, including the ‘Lašva Valley Ethnic Cleansing’ of Bosniak Muslim civilians by members of the Croatian Defence Council (H.V.O.) and Croatian Army (H.V.) cadres (May 1992-April 1993), and ‘Srebrenica Massacre’ of 11-22 July 1995, in which the Army of Republika Srpska (V.R.S.)-personnel under General Ratko Mladić (b. 1943) and ‘Greek Volunteer Guards’ (G.D.G.) were reported to have had summarily executed 8,373 Bosniaks, had been commemorated in different works of superior fiction, including publications by Semezdin Mehmedinović, Eve Ensler, Scott Simon, Steven Galloway, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Kersh, and Joe Sacco, among others. Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary (1993) earned her the sobriquet of ‘The Anne Frank of Sarajevo’. But no work or film can precisely capture the horrors of the approximately fifty-thousand Muslim and Catholic Christian women who were understood to have been intermittently raped after being detained at different eastern Bosnia and Grbavica camps, most notably at the ‘Karaman’s House’, Foča. The ‘Manjača Concentration Camp’ allegedly operated by the Yugoslav National Army (J.N.A.) personnel and Republika Srpska authorities between 1991 and 1995, and the Dretelj, Heliodrom, Keraterm, Omarska, Trnopolje, and Uzamnica Camps, can easily be compared to the different concentration camps the Nazis had set up for incarcerating the Jews at such places as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen.

The principal leaders during the Bosnian belligerence were Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006) (President of Serbia), Radovan Karadžić (b. 1945) (President of Republika Srpska), Ratko Mladić (the V.R.S. Chief of Staff), Vojislav Šešelj (b. 1954) (paramilitary leader) and Fikret Abdić (b. 1939) (acting president of A.P. Western Bosnia), who were pitted against Franjo Tuđman (1922-99) (President of Croatia), Janko Bobetko (1919-2003) (Croatian Army general), Alija Izetbegović (1925-2003) (President of Bosnia and Herzegovina), Sefer Halilović (b.1952) and Enver Hadžihasanović (b. 1950) (the two chiefs of staff of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘À.R.Bi.H’), Mate Boban (1940-97) (President of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia), and Milivoj Petković (b. 1949) (H.V.O. Chief of Staff). Later, Leighton Smith (b. 1939) supervised the N.A.T.O. bombing campaign against Republika Srpska.

With the 1989 dissolution of the former socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Muslim-majority-nation, achieved independence in 1991, and it was followed by the establishment of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia. The continual existence of the Yugoslavian military personnel in Bosnia and Herzegovina as V.R.S. servicemen in spite of the Yugoslavians’ official exit from the country mobilised the Croatians to form the defensive H.V.O. while the alarmed Bosniaks reorganised themselves as À.R.Bi.H. cadres. These defensive measures infuriated the Serbs, who were known to have been massacred during the Second World War by the Croat-supported Nazis, to attack the Bosniaks. During the infamous ‘Siege of Sarajevo’ – Sarajevo being the capital-city of Bosnia and Herzegovina – thirty thousand former Yugoslavian and Republika Srpska military personnel surrounded the city from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, and in the ensuing gun-battles, approximately 6,110 Bosniak soldiers and 10,000 civilian residents of the besieged capital were estimated to have been killed, and over 56,000 city-dwellers grievously injured. On 5 February 1994, a single 120-milimetre-mortar-shell landed in the centre of a crowded Markale (market-place) killing 68 civilians and wounding 144 marketers. The war, which perplexed most of the citizens of the fighting-nations by its real objectives, could be ended only after the direct intervention of the ‘United Nations’ Protection Force’ (U.N.PRO.FOR) and N.A.T.O. troops from April 1994 onwards.

The Bosnian War, which ended with the ‘International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’ (I.C.T.Y.) trying principally the Serbian politicians and military officers, has been commemorated in several award-winning Hollywood films, latest in Angelina Jolie’s “In the Land of Blood and Honey”. Importantly, the confrontation alarmed the Indians against relying on European aid too much for many of the European countries, since the 16th century, are engaged in assaulting one another over imperialistic and allied interests. The Indian Army could also understand the destructive force of snipers in modern belligerence for Serbian snipers often wrecked havoc in the war. Twenty years passed away since the Bosnian War was declared, Europe is still seething in tension, including the uneasy relationship between the Balkan countries, and chances of the re-eruption of violence, unless the international community demonstrates utmost strictness in handling and condemning unjustified warring all over the globe, cannot be ruled out.


– Reported by: Pinaki Roy; Balurghat, 4 May 2012.