PATIALA, PUNJAB - Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) sent a memorandum was to Dr. Manmohan Singh through Deputy Commissioner, Patiala on the occasion of protest demonstration on the issue of Female Foeticide and State Policy at Patiala on 21 August 2006. The memorandum is as follows:

We are conscious and aware that female infanticide and female foeticide are societal problems. Much has been written about this and numerous social, cultural and economic factors have been mentioned as the key issues -both as problems and as possible solutions. However this note is to point out another dimension and perspective, which has been completely ignored by a major cross section of civil society. The Voluntary Health Association of Panjab, an NGO doing pioneering work in the field of gender rights, calls female foeticide as violence against women. Foeticide as genocide is our issue and we hold the Indian state squarely responsible for the menace daunting Punjab today and we have cogent reasons for doing so.

Statistics show that the fall in the juvenile sex ratio is much higher in the economically developed States in India. There is steep fall in sex ratio in States like, Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat and Maharashtra, along with the Union territories of Delhi and Chandigarh. In Punjab there are only 874 females per 1,000 males. The situation in Haryana, Gujarat and Maharashtra is also similar - the females are 861, 921 and 922 respectively per 1,000 males. Kerala is the only State where females are 1,058 per 1,000 males.

The following is the sex ratio chart from 1951 to 2001.

YEAR - SEX RATIO
Females per 1,000 males

1951 - 946
1961 - 941
1971 - 930
1981 - 934
1991 - 927
2001 - 933

Source: Census of India, 2001.

Since the so-called independence of this country, the situation has grown from bad to worse. The state has been a mute witness to this tide and the negligence of the Indian state in this area can be compared to another gross negligence in the growth of AIDS in the country.

Under Indian laws and under international laws, whose duty is it to protect the life and liberty of an individual -born or about to be born? Since the last 100 years, studies have been done ad nauseam into causes of the occurrence and recurrence of female infanticide and foeticide and they are too well-known to the rulers of this country. The contribution of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and the Governor General of India from 1828-1835, Lord William Bentick cannot be wished away. Our pertinent question to you and through you to the whole country is, "What has the state machinery at various levels done to undo this systematic decline in the sex-ratio of the country and particularly in the vulnerable states?

Why has no action been taken against erring doctors and hospitals? Why are doctors and hospitals allowed to advertise in violation of the code of conduct fixed by the Indian Medical Association? Why does the IMA not follow the same strict and stringent rules and regulations as followed by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India for supervision of activities of all its members? Why is the state not strictly enforcing the registration of ultrasound clinics as required under the PNDT Act?

Is it not shocking that the first conviction for the crime of foeticide over all these years was made in March 2006? Is this not a reflection on the working of the Indian judiciary? Just as the state executive authority has been lax against perpetrators of this crime, the Supreme Court of India too has been dilly dallying on the issue. On all other counts against the Sikhs, the Supreme Court acts with alarming speed, canceling bails, not admitting cases and questioning the locus standi on frivolous grounds, but in cases of such barbaric crimes, it chooses to look the other way. Passports of political dissenters are impounded and those who toe the state line, even if they are accused of murder, like Jagir Kaur, are allowed to roam around the world, bringing harm to the reputation of the Sikhs.

What efforts have been made by the Central Ministry of Human Resources Development and the State Education Ministry to bolster the education of the girl child? What steps have been taken to ensure that the drop out rate of the girl child is reduced? What incentives have been offered for the education of the girl child? What has the state done to lessen the impact of the demeaning media onslaught on TV channels and the Indian cinema? Does the increasing number of dowry deaths raise the hackles of the state machinery any more?

Today, we will restrict ourselves to Punjab. Since the last one week, newspapers have been screaming about the disclosure of "mass graves of the female child" in Patiala and around. Cutting across religious lines and irrespective of the social strata, people in general are deeply upset. The Chief Minister of Panjab has yet to make a statement on the issue. The opposition leadership is too busy protecting and promoting wayward sons. The Health Minister of India is silent. You are a Sikh and hail from Punjab, but you too have not intervened. This conspiracy of silence and impunity has definitely bestirred us into action even though the Congress government at the Centre and the State continues to lie in deep slumber.

What is the state policy to prevent female foeticide in Panjab?

The Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) is of the opinion that the Indian state is following an ongoing programme of genocide of the Sikhs. The Indian state machinery is acutely aware of what is going on in the Panjab. Through the media and their own well-entrenched intelligence networks, the state knows the full extent of the mass murder of the female child being committed in the state. It has consciously and deliberately chosen to let things happen. It has not taken any steps to prevent the inhuman deeds. It has failed to initiate any social, cultural, religious, economic or political activity to educate the people and declare an all-out war on the menace of female foeticide.

It has chosen to do so as it is part of their genocide plan. Killing the males in the fields of Punjab through brute force, torture and extrajudicial killings and killing the unborn female in the wombs has suited the gameplan of India. According to the estimates made by Mr. Anurag, a Punjabi bureaucrat, one lakh girl children are killed every year. Combined with the widespread increase in migratory population from other states, in the name of "Indianism", the Indian state has dealt a serious blow to the demographic proportions of the Sikh people in the Punjab. Is someone not gleefully laughing at the fact that the stock of the Sikhs is being affected by making them marry outside their race in their own homeland, Punjab?

This is not a farfetched argument to subvert the issue. There is no doubt that the doctors conducting the tests, the women allowing the tests and the family members forcing the tests are all responsible. Our plea is what is the state doing? What signals did you give, Mr. Prime Minister, when you had meetings with the erstwhile SGPC chief, Ms. Jagir Kaur? Did the PMO not apprise you that she is an accused in a double murder case - that of honour killing of her daughter and of her unborn child? Did the intelligence not provide you the input that after killing her daughter, she was cremated without conducting a routine post-mortem and that the then Chief Minister of Panjab, Mr. Parkash Singh Badal, attended the funeral ceremony? The mere meeting with such a person amounts to condoning the abetment and connivance in the murder of her daughter and her unborn child by Jagir Kaur and Parkash Singh Badal.

Our party also holds the Supreme court of India and Panjab and Haryana Court responsible for this abominable crime as both these courts have consistently put spokes in the wheels of justice in not allowing the trial of the murderess Jagir Kaur to carry on speedily, though from time to time both courts have been appealed to, to have the trial finished. To make matters worse the Courts have liberally granted Jagir Kaur permission to leave India on foreign trips to Europe, whereby the process of justice has been ground to a halt by her consistent absence from the Courts. This wayward behaviour of the Courts and the non-chalance by the Indian judiciary has encouraged hospitals, like the one found in Patran to carry on with their diabolic business ventures of aborting the Sikh female child, under the very nose of your Chief Minister. Why weren't the illegal abortions discovered at the very stage that they began by the Punjab police department and the Health Department. What happened to the state's and your intelligence agencies?

As a Sikh you must know that female infanticide, killing of a female or a female child in its womb is a cardinal sin(bajjar kariat) as per the laid out code of conduct of the Sikh religion. Ms. Jagir Kaur, now Avtar Singh Makkar both the previous and present Presidents of the SGPC, Parkash Singh Badal and his son Sukhbir Singh and Amarinder Singh, Chief Minister have had several private meetings with you. Did you at any time invite their attention to the Sikh code on female infanticide? The Jathedar of the Akal Takhat who is the authority to enforce this code has also maintained a stone like silence on this crime. Have we all become the stooges of the Indian state to change the demography of the Sikhs in India? When the Indian state demands we click our heels and come to attention. Who will represent the Sikh race? We are all quiet on the French turban issue of the Sikh. We play it safe on racial crime against the Sikh in America. A Sikh can't buy land in Rajathan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, whereas residents of these states can buy land and property in the Punjab. Punjabi has not been given a linguistic status in Haryana, Rajasthan, UP, Uttar Anchal, Himachal Pradesh, UT Chandigarh and Jammu and Kashmir, though Sikhs in these states constitute large minorities. You have two ministers in your Cabinet, P Chidambaram and Kamal Nath who have committed the genocide of the Sikhs. Mercifully through leftist pressure you had to drop Jagdish Tytler. But none have been brought to trial. We are all too busy celebrating the birthdays and death anniversaries of Jawarlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Narsimha Rao, Beant Singh and Harchand Singh Longowal to look into the cause for discontent in the Sikh nation. All these leaders are responsible for the events that took place before and after 1984. Posthumously they are all fit to be brought before the Hague Court to be tried for war crimes who have destroyed and wrecked the Sikh peoples. When will your Minority and Human Right Commission step in to take cognizance of these acts of genocide?

It would be pertinent to ask you as to how much money has the government of India and the government of Punjab spent to stop female foeticide in Punjab.

What efforts has the government done to implement measures taken by the British, when they ruled India? It is well known that the British used to divest everyone of his property and property rights, once it was known that the person had committed female infanticide.

The British administrators treated female infanticide as murder tried as such under the English law. They confiscated the estates of the offending fathers and tried them for murder. In some cases, the district administrators gave summary punishments to the father of the infant. They appointed agents to report on cases of infanticide and rewarded them for each reported case. What is stopping the government of Punjab to emulate such efforts?

The Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) as well as other participants of the Gurdwara Reform Movement -II are determined to expose the evil role of the Indian state in protecting the right to life of the girl child in Punjab. We are also dedicated to create mass awareness about the teachings of Guru Nanak who extolled the status, identity, equality and importance of women to society. We will learn from the work of Guru Amardass, who worked against female infanticide, encouraged widow remarriage and anointed women preachers for various areas for the propagation of the Sikh religion.

It is a crying shame that in this day and age, "the world's largest democracy" chooses to let barbaric practices continue as it suits their political ends. India has not signed a large number of international statutes and therefore gets away with its international responsibility to the international community. Every year in Punjab about one lakh girls die before they are born. This is not a figment of an alarmist imagination but the level-headed calculation of a senior Punjab bureaucrat who has written a book on the subject. Anurag Aggarwal has got this figure from simple mathematics. ''With a gross birth rate of 3 per cent, Punjab should see 7.5 lakh births every year—3.5 lakh females and an equal number of males. But the census shows that one-fourth of baby girls go missing. This translates into 1 lakh girls a year.''

A whole generation of female babies has been lost in India in the mean time, especially in the states of Punjab, Haryana and Delhi. Statistics are there in plenty: the British Journal Lancet estimated that over 10 million girl babies were lost in India over the last 20 years; the national average female ratio has gone down from 972 in 1901 to just 933 in 2001 and in Haryana, there are about 861 women for every 1,000 men as opposed to the national average of 927 women to 1,000 men; in the Mansa district of Punjab, there are only 779 females per 1000 males.

Our message today to you and to the whole world is that in as far as Panjab is concerned, female foeticide is genocide".

In her path-breaking analysis, Kalpana Kannabiran, a faculty member of the Nalsar University, Hyderabad and noted author equates female foeticide with gender cleansing. She says that female foeticide is a crime against humanity and all states, including India should be held responsible for their acts of omission and commission.

We more than endorse her views. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights opens with an assertion of the equal inalienable rights of all members of the human family to inherent dignity and the recognition of the aspiration of the common people for a world that is free from experiences of barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of humankind.

She says that "Articles 1, 2, 3, 7, 16 (3), 22, and 25 (2) are specifically relevant to the present purpose, addressing questions of entitlement to dignity and freedom without distinction of race, colour, sex etc. It further asserts the right to life, liberty, security of persons and equality before the law; the entitlement of the family to protection by the state; the entitlement to the realization of social security; care and assistance towards motherhood and childhood.. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, are stated to enjoy the same social protection. Finally everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set out in the Declaration can be fully realized.

This view can be further supplemented by the Genocide Convention. For a crime to be defined as genocide, any of the following five acts should have been committed with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part: a) killing members of the group (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group (c) deliberately inflicting conditions of life on the group that are calculated to bring about its physical destruction (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) forcibly transferring children of the particular group to another group.

Female Foeticide and female infanticide satisfy four of the five criteria set out in the Genocide Convention. Female foeticide alone already matches, even surpasses the worst episodes of genocide in scale: 50 lakh female fetuses [even the official estimate of 20 lakhs will suffice] a year are aborted after sex determination tests, leading to a sharp decline in the sex ratio. In the 0-6 age group, the 2001 census shows a decline in sex ratio from 945 girls for every thousand boys in 1991 to 927. Punjab is at an unspeakable 793. In the light of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, female feticide, by bringing about a physical destruction of an entire class of persons by actively preventing births of members of that class, is a direct infringement on the right to life, dignity and security of person for surviving members of the class. It further impinges upon their mental well being, through the creation of an environment of terror and hate engendered by such mass destruction."

Kalpana Kannabiran has hit the nail on the head, when she says, "It is in the naming that the problem lies, and it is because of the naming that the problem persists. Female foeticide is not a social evil. It is gender cleansing — the extermination of an entire generation of women, and by extension, all future generations as well."

We believe that in Punjab, as the majority in the state happens to be Sikhs, India is deliberately allowing the genocide to happen. Female foeticide, to us not only meets the definition of genocide on four out of five counts, but is also an act against the Sikh ethnic peoples. It is Crime against humanity. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in Article 7 defines "Crimes against Humanity" as "any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: (a) Murder; (b) Extermination; (c) Enslavement; (d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population; (e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; (f) Torture; (g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity; (h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law; (i) Enforced disappearance of persons; (j) The crime of apartheid; (k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

As stated by Kalpana Kannabiran, "'According to the Rome Statute, "extermination" includes the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of a part of the population. 'Persecution" means the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity. Extermination through systematic murder of newborn female infants and through abortion of female fetuses [under clause (g) above] is part of the persecution of women as a class [clause (h) above]. In accordance with the Statute then, female feticide meets the definition of a Crime against Humanity strictly construed and not by analogy.

Article 25 of the Rome Statute addresses the crucial question of individual criminal responsibility. Clause (3) states that 'a person shall be criminally responsible and liable for punishment for a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court if that person: (a) Commits such a crime, whether as an individual, jointly with another or through another person, regardless of whether that other person is criminally responsible; (b) Orders, solicits or induces the commission of such a crime which in fact occurs or is attempted; (c) For the purpose of facilitating the commission of such a crime, any one who abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission, including providing the means for its commission; (d) In any other way contributes to the commission or attempted commission of such a crime by a group of persons acting with a common purpose.. .(f) Attempts to commit such a crime by taking action that commences its execution by means of a substantial step, but the crime does not occur because of circumstances independent of the person's intentions".

Kalpana Kannabiran puts it very aptly when she says, "Any enactment of national legislation on female foeticide must take cognizance of its occurrence in radically new terms in order to effectively combat it, but more importantly to put an end to impunity, which is the hallmark of this practice today.... This is one more reason why India must ratify the Rome Statute."

The United Nations too has termed sex determination and female foeticide as a shameful act of gender violence. "If there is any one indicator that reflects what is happening to our women in our society, it is that they are not even given the chance and rights to be born. Sex selection, the practice of selecting the desired sex and eliminating the unwanted one perhaps is the most shameful and worst form of gender violence," Sharareh Amir Khalili, representative of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), told a seminar on gender equality in Indian capital New Delhi.

The Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) is determined to stop the tide of female foeticide and defeat the ethnic cleansing gameplan of the Indian state. The shrill cries from the wells of Patiala are a clarion call to the Sikh nation and should also serve as a warning for the Indian state.

Simranjit Singh Mann,
President, Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar)

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