Fascinating NY Times story about Sunil Jaglan, a village headman who has become a crusader for women's rights in India.
When the nurse stepped out of the delivery room, her face turned somber as she approached with a baby in her arms wrapped in a blanket. Her voice dropped to a hush, almost like she was ashamed, as she announced to the family: “It is a daughter.”When Jaglan's daughter was born, the state of Haryana had 832 female babies per 1,000 males, mostly because of sex-selective abortion, which is illegal in India but very common nonetheless.
Nothing about the nurse’s negative demeanor surprised Sunil Jaglan, the newborn’s father. Growing up in the northern Indian state of Haryana, he was accustomed to parents’ strong preference for having sons over daughters.
But something within him snapped, he said, when he offered the nurse money as a thank you gesture, and she refused because she had not handed over a boy. . . .
That episode transformed him into an unlikely champion of women’s rights in a deeply patriarchal society. He turned the nurse’s four words, uttered almost as a curse — “It is a daughter” — into a slogan for a campaign that health officials say is responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of girls in Haryana.
But of course none of this is simple. Some of what Jaglan has done seems to me unquestionably great, like, he started a social media campaign #SelfieWithDaughter, persuading Indian men to post pictures with their daughters, which took off when some cricket stars did it. But this also has an authoritarian side:
Although it was not within his authority to do so — and some considered it an egregious invasion of privacy — Mr. Jaglan made it mandatory for village families to report a household pregnancy within four weeks, a decision that angered many in Bibipur and beyond.
Through a network of women informers, he and his team of volunteers would follow pregnant women like detectives when it was suspected they were being taken for prenatal sex tests. If that was indeed the case, they would work to have the woman’s husband or her in-laws arrested, with the police operating on the assumption that the pregnant woman herself had little or no say in the decision.
This worked in Jaglan's village, bringing the gender ratio of new births back to 50-50. And thngs do seem to be changing in India as a whole; the ratio of female to male babies has risen from 876 to 1000 in 2015 to 926 to 1000 in 2021.
I find myself wondering what issues are so important that they justify heavy-handed state intervention. We have seen long arguments about whether drug use justifies a "war." A few years ago there were a bunch of stories about Indian feminists who were smashing up the saloons where rural men were drinking away their salaries, leaving (the activists said) their families hungry. Some Americans think gun violence is such a terrible problem that the government should seize everyone's guns. So if so many families are aborting female fetuses that the gender ratio ends up horribly skewed, does that justify registering pregnant women and encouraging their neighbors to spy on them?
What should a government like India's do to promote gender equality? Can government action really change ancient attitudes about gender in village society? The questions go on and on, as they always do with me.
One thing to consider that government action can do is make room for people who were intimidated by those who were practicing the custom that gets banned. The war on drugs can't cure addiction, but it does make life better for people who don't want others shooting up in public on the street where they live, or in the parks where they walk, etc. Forcing men not to drink their salaries away makes life better for their wives and children. Hyping the value of daughters makes it easier for parents who want to cherish a daughter to ignore the sourness and sly digs of their relatives who wanted a boy. And so on.
ReplyDeleteI would also say that, in this country, both right and left are, on the whole, comfortable with government coercion. They simply disagree on what should be coerced.
ReplyDeleteAnd, to make explicit and general the point I was making in the first post, I would say it is impossible for human relations to be devoid of coercion in one direction or another, or probably several at once. Tolerance for drug users and open-carry weapons laws both force people who are not comfortable with those behaviors to put up with them.
At the risk of harping, I would add further that the anarchists and libertarians are wrong to think that removing the state will remove coercion from human life. Humans are quite able to coerce one another, and prone to do so. Government coercion simply adds weight to one side or another--and, in many cases, serves mainly as an equalizer; many of those who claim to resent coercion are, I suggest, simply angry about this equalization.
ReplyDelete@David
ReplyDeleteAs somehow who truly harps on, I don't think you harped on at all, but commend the restraint.
Anywho, I basically agree with all your observations.
The one thing I would add, is that it seems weird to me that the conversation shifted to address government actions, when what is going on here is largely the opposite - a village headman going on his own personal crusade, and acting outside the bounds of what the broader government deems acceptable.
This isn't "the government" as we normally think of it acting to curb sex-selective abortions, this is a community grappling with itself over a problem that different parts of the community feel differently about.