Old shackles still bind the new Indian woman

The Radhika Yadav murder epitomises the contradictions of the present moment, where young women’s desire to write their own futures, away from the shackles of family and community, poses a threat to patriarchy

- Ravinder Kaur

A father killing a daughter might appear shocking to some urban denizens of Delhi and the rest of the civilised world. Not to me, though. It is as routine as the everyday violence that girls and women in India face, as they do in many other countries across the world. Indeed, no country is free of gender violence.

India has just about begun to turn its back on a scourge that has haunted its girls for the past several decades — the sex selective abortion of female foetuses, a virulent form of son preference. Many thought this method of daughter killing was an improvement over female infanticide; it arguably absolved one of the guilt stemming from wilfully ending the life of a newborn child. Assisted by state-of-the-art diagnostic technologies, the patriarchal desire for sons resulted in India losing millions of girls. Their aborted birth inflicted involuntary bachelorhood on thousands of men in the northern and western regions of the country. And in a perverse logic, people ended up sympathising with these “hapless” men, who were seen as unfairly deprived of wives from their own culture and community. Such men were “forced” to bring poor women as wives from far-off states such as Assam and West Bengal, suffer the trauma of societal shame, and, even worse, accept so-called tainted lineages. This concern made the Haryana khaps finally come around to the view that killing one’s own daughters wasn't perhaps such a good idea. Protecting the old order of caste, community, and kinship pride was the rationale, not that girls inherently deserved to live and thrive.