Letter from Chennai: Girls being killed in Jaya's constituency

A ghoulish religious ritual was enacted last Wednesday in Perayur village, some 50 km from Madurai. One hundred and five children were 'buried' alive and then dug up again to propitiate two female deities. This is a five-yearly religious festival said to be more than four centuries old.

Fortunately no lives were lost.

In Andipatti, the constituency which elected Chief Minister Jayaram Jayalalithaa to office, at least 43 out of 1,818 girl children were killed by their parents immediately after birth.

According to a newspaper report, the mother of two girl children openly confessed that she had buried alive the third girl child. The reason: "Can poor people like us afford to have three daughters?"

In Andipatti and nearby Usilampatti, the sex ratio has dipped alarmingly in recent years. The report says that for every 1,000 male children in Andipatti, there are less than 870 girl babies – one of the lowest proportions in the country.

Southern Tamil Nadu is notorious for female infanticide. Apart from poverty and the dowry system, there is an element of superstition also interwoven into this practice. In some places female babies are considered inauspicious.

Efforts have been made to root out this practice. But action taken is insufficient and the practice continues. Public Health Centres have managed to 'rescue' some of the babies, but instances are few and far between.

The police are powerless in the face of joint community resistance to punishing the murdering parents. Poverty, the caste system, replete with examples of treatment of Dalits as virtually sub-human, and superstition further compound the situation.

There is a 'dargah' in Erawadi in Ramanad district which has the reputation of curing insanity.
Ramshackle hutments mushroomed in the vicinity of the dargah to house the hundreds of believers who flocked to it.

One condition is that the person who is insane has to be chained. Last year 67 insane people were charred to death when fire broke out in one of the hutments. The victims had been chained.

Superstition and obscurantism have no class barriers. Very often they attain an aura of respectability when such practices are sheltered as 'religious rituals' and zealously guarded as independent personal beliefs. Rituals involving killing of animals are performed as offerings to deities by or on behalf of important political leaders.

All these make the Tamil psyche a complex amalgam. The state has produced some of the greatest religious thinkers, scientists and politicians. At the same time Tamil Nadu can claim to have had the largest number of personalities of the cinema as their political leaders.

DMK chief M. Karunanidhi is a noted film scriptwriter. The late M.G. Ramachandran had little difficulty in shifting from the Tamil cinema to the political stage. He introduced Jayalalithaa, often starring in films with him, into politics and sent her as a Member of Parliament to New Delhi. Karunanidhi's son and the DMK's heir apparent has also been an actor.

And now there is talk that Rajnikant, the latest superstar of the Tamil screen, is toying with the idea of moving over to politics. That was one of the reasons for Pattali Makkal Party leader Dr S. Ramadoss's attack on Rajni-starrer Baba which had its premiere last week.

Ramadoss just did not want another star on the political stage with his own popularity steadily going down.

Cynics talk of the film culture in this state, but have to accept the actors on their terms. One reason for this situation could be that for the vast, poor masses in this state, film heroes attain the level of gods and goddesses in whom they blindly believe. There was a temple built for actress Khushboo!

These heroes and heroines help to take them out of grinding poverty if only for an hour or two. Most major film actors in Tamil Nadu have fan clubs. It is even said that the AIADMK, which was created by MGR, is today Jayalalithaa's fan club with a political sheen.

Today Jayalalithaa, like MGR, has mesmerised the people of the state. If the state goes to the polls, the odds will be on her winning hands down.

But, since a culture of democracy has been introduced in state politics, however weak, the spell might not last too long. The DMK, which is a cadre-based party is waiting for that awakening.

Jayalalithaa will not give up easily. She is currently trying to appease the BJP-led central government in New Delhi to bail her out of the financial crisis afflicting Tamil Nadu.

But, as she said on Wednesday, she is for the present maintaining equidistance between the two national parties, the Congress party and the BJP. She has her own dreams of securing all the 39 Tamil Nadu parliament seats as and when general elections are held and bargain for power in Delhi.