Please do not make the mistake of thinking these things happen only in the savage wilds of rural India. In cosmopolitan Mumbai last week, a grandmother drowned her two-month-old granddaughter in a water tank. She wanted a grandson.

A recent UN report revealed that nearly half of India’s children are ‘malnourished’. We can be sure that the majority of those malnourished ones are girls, because in the average Indian home the boy gets fed first. In poorer families, it is only boys who get medical attention when they get sick. Girls are left to die. If you look at rape statistics the horror of what happens to little girls in Indian society is almost too sickening to discuss.

Something like 60 per cent of rapes in India are of children below the age of 12.

Then there is child trafficking, in which the victims are nearly always girls. As a hardboiled hack, let me say that the most disturbing story I ever did in my life was on child prostitutes in Mumbai’s brothels. Even as I write this, I see the sad, little faces of ten-year-old girls who were servicing ten and fifteen men a day and were beaten brutally if they protested. Go to any brothel in Mumbai and you will meet them still.

When that self-appointed guardian of Indian ‘culture’ went to court in Jaipur to seek satisfaction for being ‘offended’ by the kiss, did he not know that the condition of the girl child in Rajasthan is almost worse than anywhere else in India? Not only are female literacy rates among the lowest, but the last well-known case of Sati occurred less than a hundred kilometers from Jaipur. Remember Roop Kanwar, all of 18 years, and a graduate. She ‘wanted’ to commit Sati, they said afterwards, and now she is a goddess.

... contd.