What Aamir Khan spoke about in his show, is nothing new. All of us, the responsible citizens of a quasi-developed country, are aware of every iota of it. Female foeticide is no new concept, and the torture of women is nothing astounding. What left us shocked is the encounter with the starkness of the truth.
The very fact that there were monsters in the garb of doctors, people who openly showed their middle fingers to the Hippocratic Oath, left each and every viewer stupefied. The women doctors who go about suggesting ‘means’ to dispose the female child – I wonder where their businesses and monetary gains would go had their own parents too aborted them.
We have a society where women are murdered in cold blood even before they begin to breathe, and somehow if they are able to evade death within the womb, they are raised and brought up to fight with a plethora of evils all through her life. Just being cognizant of the harsh statistics leaves us with no choice bu
t to hang our heads in despair and helplessness. Truth, they said, was stranger than fiction. What they did not say, however, is that it is potent enough to kill. Or to resurrect. That part of ourselves called conscience.
While on the one hand we go about killing female foetuses, on the other we don’t have enough women to get our sons married to. Out of the 914 girls who survive against every 1000 guys, scores of them are raped, a considerable percentage killed for dowry, many more tortured for speaking out against the wrongs done to them. Sons are born to smiling faces, and daughters are wiped off from the face of the earth – and sighs of relief are heaved once the ‘job’ is done. Aamir Khan’s ‘Satyamev Jayate’ has jolted the consciousness of many human beings awake. The million dollar question now remains – will we be able to continue the crusade against the wrongs done to women, or will this too, leave us like a passing tide, with only the residues of emotions in our hearts?
That mothers are beyond comparison, is a fact now known by so many people that it seems pointless to even talk about it. The fact that mothers go through numerous abortions just to be able to see the face of a newborn
son leave us with no choice but to curse the likes of them and wish that perhaps some day they will be able to see the truth. That their very sons, whom they cherish and pamper and bring up, will be the ones to rape women later in their life. No moral lessons and no etiquettes and no values will then work. Hormones and repressed frustrations will take over everything else. The situation in the country is grave, not any longer. It is well past that stage. If there would exist a red alarm for the raising levels of this crime, it would have throbbed and pulsated and blasted itself to ripped ears by now. The sorrow lies in the fact that people are either deaf or choose not to hear the threatening call of the hour. They go about with their sinister dark deeds and pine for a shining India.
The irony of the entire pandemonium lies in the fact that the evil called female foeticide begins in houses where the literacy level is as high as the sky, and people go about imparting ‘education’ to others. ‘Satyamev Jayate’ wasn’t a moral science class for us. It was a blow beyond anything else.
The way one crime ends up being a rallying point for a vertiginous number of others is proved by the way female foeticide has led to a macrocosm of other evils. The fabric of the society, which was once ruffled, lies in shreds now. Girls are being bought, sold, abducted, and what not. All over the country, little girls are being smuggled to the death-holes where men reign with their unbridled violent selves.
Life is never easy for a woman. Leaving one’s own house to embrace another’s as her own is nothing short of a herculean task. What demands an answer is the question – can’t their lives be uncomplicated just a bit?
May be Aamir and his show will be able to provide a rock-solid answer. May be we will reflect a bit in front of our television sets and then go about our usual work like nothing ever happened. May be people will wake up to a truly uniform country some day. Someday. One day.
(The views expressed by the author are personal)