Female infanticide: Gallows for father

Chandigarh, November 9

It’s gallows for a father who scripted the obituary of his daughter much before she was born. Less than a year after Mukesh Kumar killed his four-day-old daughter, a Sangrur court today ordered he “be hanged by his neck till he is dead”.

The capital punishment order, perhaps the first-of-its-kind in a female infanticide case, was pronounced in an open court this morning by Sangrur District and Sessions Judge M.S. Chauhan.

In his order reflecting the need for putting to an end the menace of eliminating babies, Judge Chauhan asserted: “At the centre of this case is a new-born. She was a baby girl. Her arrival was a calamity. She was a source of anxiety to her father, the accused, for, in her, he saw a difficult problem of her marriage.

“She was seen as a compulsion, a burden. Very thought of her marriage was enough to ruin him. She was a poor little thing and the blocking of a puff of wind was enough to put her out. “The accused, it seems, had scripted her obituary much before she was born. This is the story of an unnamed infant; probably this is the first decision which cannot even refer to the victim by her name. She was eliminated before she could have one!

“Her brief existence in the world was reduced to a piece of mere statistics - A number stood added to the population of the world, a number stood added to the female population of the world, a number stood subtracted from the population of the world, a number stood subtracted from the female population of the world, the male-female ratio got further imbalanced in India, a credit entry was made in the Register of Births, and a debit entry was made in the Register of Deaths.

“A smile was lost forever. The moral regression of the people of India has not been crippled by the penal laws. The policy of persuasion has failed”.

During the trial, Judge Chauhan heard the accused on January 21, at or around 8 am, intentionally caused the death of his daughter, born on January 18

Judge Chauhan was told that the accused was not happy with the girl child’s birth. Having found the four-day-old alone, he gagged her.

Bringing alive the deadly facts on female infanticide and foeticide, Judge Chauhan referred to a recent study to assert: “Son preference has become daughter hatred in India in the recent decades…. In rural areas where a lot of people do not have access to sex determination facilities, female infanticide is shockingly common.

“The parents wait until the mother gives birth, and when they find out that a daughter is born, they go ahead and kill the baby by adopting various means such as strangling the baby, giving her poison, dumping her in a garbage bin, drowning her, burying her alive, starving her, stuffing her mouth with salt, or leaving her outdoors overnight so that she dies of exposure”.

Before parting with the order, Judge Chauhan asserted: “The only punishment that can be awarded to the convict is the extreme penalty of death, as the society needs to be insulated against persons of the ilk of the convict”.