History is a chronicle of how outrageous conduct and practices become unacceptable and politically incorrect. Once upon a time, for example, perfectly decent folk took it for granted that killing of female infants and watching and abetting a young widow immolate herself on her husband's pyre were the right things to do, if sat and dharma were to be maintained in the society.

Several members of our cultural derriere-garde, however, are still perplexed by the new rules that have come to be applied to our democracy, particularly in the area of gender justice. They are quick to point out a `foreign hand' behind each step towards opening up of the society. The reports that reveal and highlight the terrible track record of India's treatment of females seem to them rooted in a conspiracy hatched on foreign shores. Bharat Jhunjhunwala's article,`As women vanish in statistics' (October 20) typified this attitude.

The UNFPA in a recent report has pointed out that the GOI (census) statistics showing the male-female population ratio at 921 females per 1000 males in 1991 census, from 995 females to 1000 males in 1901, should be a cause of grave concern to all. It has noted that while a state like Kerala is more or less on par with the universal average (of almost equal numbers of both sexes) census data from the northern states like Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh reveals an alarming rise in female-deficiency. The report has estimated that some 48 million Indian women are thus missing from the data. And this skewed male-female ratio in India, if not addressed, can cause major socio-economic aberrations in future. To Jhunjhunwala the UN figures are just so much statistical jugglery.

Actually, the high and increasing masculinity of the sex-ratios in India has been attracting attention for a long time. Visaria's pathbreaking study of this problem of high Female Mortality Rate (FMR) had established more than two decades ago how the main factor behind this alarming decline in numbers of Indian females was rooted in the lesser socio-economic worth of the female in India. He had also recognised that the FMR was not a pan-Indian phenomenon, but showed sharp regional variations. In southern states where women's labour participation and social acceptance were greater, the FMR was remarkably lower than in the north. This theory placed a strong emphasis upon the importance of cultural factors on female survival patterns, but for reasons other than underscored by Jhunjhunwala, who comes to the astounding conclusion that all regional variations must have a natural course and this is sustained further by local culture. Thus to him, due to some natural laws, families in the north are producing more sons than daughters.

Perhaps Jhunjhunwala should read an excellent recent paper (`Sex Ratio Variations in India: What do languages Tell Us?' 1996). In it S. B. Agnihotri, the author, has demonstrated with scientific precision how the north-south divide has emerged as a persistent feature of all sex-ratio studies. A clear dividing line between female-deficient and normal status, he avers, runs along the valley of the river Narmada, the Vindhya-Satura range and the Chhota Nagpur hills in Southern Bihar. The states on the north-western side of the divide where the Indo-Aryan culture holds sway, have to own up consistently high masculine sex-ratios, unfavourable to women. Given the terribly son-centred socio-economic mores of the area, the sex-ratios among the speakers of Indo-Aryan language groups are becoming increasing pro-male in contrast to those of the tribal and Dravidian groups who may be poorer but more pro-women traditionally.

Whoever said that prosperity and high female survival and literacy rates coexist? All recent studies of green-revolutionised states of Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab and a Mandalised state like Bihar have their crime graphs registering a constant increase in crimes against women. The harsh fact is that social change without an economic revolution or economic growth sans social change may not only strengthen existing biases, it may also create biases in social groups that previously did not have any.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.