Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 23, 1993 TAG: 9305230197
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JIM LANDERS
DATELINE: BHATERI, INDIA LENGTH: Long
In 1985, a strong personality won her the start of a very different education. Social workers took her to Jaipur, the capital of the state of Rajasthan, for two and a half weeks of training in the rights and privileges the law offers Indian women.
Bhanwari came back full of ideas. She urged the women of Bhateri to learn to read. She warned the men that child marriage is illegal.
When she told the police about the planned wedding of a 1-year-old girl to a 2-year-old boy, the men of the girl's family vowed that Bhanwari would never again raise her head in the village.
Five of them came after her on a September evening as she was weeding her field.
"They raped me," Bhanwari says. "They made my husband watch."
In a determined, sad voice, she tells a story that says much about violence and women in India, a country where discrimination is deadly and perhaps 30 million females are "missing."
Bhanwari says she doesn't know her age. Her husband, Mohun Lal, guesses his wife is 36 or 37 years old.
Their youngest daughter, Rameshawari, is 13. Seven years ago, she married a boy who is now a laborer at a nearby village.
"I was not a social worker then," Bhanwari apologizes. "If I had this awareness then, I would not have allowed it."
India's constitution requires equal pay for equal work by men and women. Its laws ban wife-beating and mental cruelty, child marriage and dowry, sexual enslavement, rape and sexual harassment, known as "Eve teasing."
But much of the law fails under the weight of 3,000 years of celebrating sons and despising daughters.
Sons inherit. Sons bring parents wealth, a dowry worth as much as four years of a bride's family's income. A son is also essential in a Hindu family to light a parent's funeral pyre and open the way to heaven.
Daughters bring financial hardship, then leave to become servants of another family.
Some female infants are killed: smothered beneath a placenta, fed poison or abandoned in the wild. More often, they simply get less than their brothers of the food and medicine needed to survive. Among children younger than 5, the death rate is three times greater for girls than for boys.
British demographers who conducted India's first census in 1901 found whole villages with no girls. They called them "blood-red villages." The census counted 972 females for every 1,000 males.
Across India, it has gotten worse. The gender ratio in the 1991 census was 929 females for every 1,000 males. (The U.S. ratio is 1,050 women for every 1,000 men.)
Tradition and technology combine today so that a female in India is in danger from the moment she is conceived. Hundreds of thousands of Indian parents use sex-determination tests to plan families of sons. Amniocentesis or ultrasound tests showing a female fetus are followed by abortions.
The practice began in the late 1970s. The number of abortions performed because of sex-determination tests since then is unknown. By June 1982, the Times of India estimated that 78,000 such abortions had taken place.
Discrimination is such that the Indian government's 1992 action plan for girls declares "She has the right to survive" as its first premise.
The plan says mothers are more likely to breast-feed sons than daughters. Boys are more likely than girls to get treatment for the diarrhea that kills 1.5 million Indian children every year. Boys are more likely to be inoculated against disease and much more likely to go to school.
The typical Indian girl lives her life in a farm village. She grows up illiterate and with two-thirds the calories she needs to achieve her height and weight potential.
One in four dies before age 15. The others marry in their teens. They have eight or nine pregnancies, six live births and raise four children before dying at an average age of 59.
More than 5,000 Indian women are burned to death each year by husbands and in-laws seeking higher dowries. (A widower is able to remarry and collect a second dowry.) Dowry itself has been illegal since 1961, but the practice is increasing.
Women's rights activists say they had hoped Indira Gandhi would act vigorously to enforce the laws protecting women during her tenure as prime minister. But Gandhi, who dominated Indian political life until her assassination in 1984, was unsympathetic to the feminist movement. She joked about her male colleagues that she was "the only man in my Cabinet."
Gandhi's son, Rajiv Gandhi, was more active as prime minister in bringing women into government before his assassination in 1991. He created a Ministry for Women and Social Welfare, and supported the grass-roots programs that ultimately led Bhanwari Devi into government service as a village worker in Bhateri.
Bhanwari's village is in Rajasthan, one of India's more violent states.
Bhateri sits behind a range of red and chalk bluffs, its small huts spilled in the hollows. Goods come to Bhateri in carts pulled by camels, or on the backs of elephants. Trucks are rare. A car attracts a crowd of gawkers.
Bhanwari and Mohun Lal, her husband, have a two-acre field and a milk cow. Their oldest daughter, married when she was 14, lives in another village. Daughter Rameshawari and her two brothers still live at home.
Each year, following the counsel of astrologers, villages throughout Rajasthan arrange mass weddings among brides and grooms as young as 1 year old.
Bhanwari says she does not remember her wedding to Mohun Lal.
"She was seven, and I was nine," Lal says with a smile. "We were engaged even before we were born."
They began living together when she was about 14.
Rajasthani village children are usually married by their 10th birthday. A girl continues to live in her father's house, at least until her first menstrual period. Then it is the father's duty to inform the boy's family that his daughter is sexually mature and ready to live with her husband.
Since 1955, India has required a girl to reach age 18 before she can marry. More than 15 percent of the girls between ages 10 and 14 are married, however, and more than half are married by 19.
"When a girl's sent away for marriage at such a young age, she'll start having children very young as well. That means more mothers will die giving birth, and more babies will die from premature birth or other weaknesses from having such a young mother," says Kanchan Mathur, one of the social scientists who sponsored Bhanwari and other village women in Rajasthan's Women's Development Project.
"Some of these girls are just 10 years old. Their education comes to a halt when they're married," Mathur says. "And what do these girls know of sex? They have no idea what's happening to them."
India's strong body of laws prohibiting violence against women is widely ignored. The courts and the police seek reconciliations and settlements. Cases that do reach the overwhelmed courts take years to reach a verdict. One survey found that more than half the rape cases filed in Bombay in 1985 were still before the courts in 1991.
Tajinder Singh Ahuja, one of the lawyers who works at Tis Hazari, has been handling women's cases for 10 years. He has yet to hear of a conviction for wife battery.
"In most wife-battering cases, it's considered not abnormal behavior but normal," Ahuja says. "The wife often describes it as a routine part of marriage. It's only when it takes a more serious turn that a woman or her family seeks legal redress. Sometimes she files criminal charges, to bring pressure on the man, but usually civil. To press criminal charges to a verdict may take several years, and when seen as such, they may seek to withdraw the charges and settle the case."
Wife-beating is part of "a culture that has been imbibed through generations. Only among the most liberated is there an awareness that this is a crime," he says.
The Women's Development Project recruited Bhanwari Devi and about 1,000 other women of Rajasthan in the mid-1980s to try to improve life for village girls and women. It was a joint effort between the Rajasthan state government and a Jaipur academic center called the Institute for Development Studies.
Village women were chosen for their natural leadership. A certain independence was required as well. Many husbands opposed sending their wives to Jaipur for two and a half weeks, says Kanchan Mathur, a program sponsor with the institute.
Project workers tell other village women how to find time to attend literacy classes. They tell women how they can find contraceptives. They explain AIDS and the risks of unprotected sex. They teach women about their rights under the law and how to fight for those rights.
Bhanwari once denounced a well-off young man who tried to rape a girl from a nearby village. She pushed the village council into staging a public trial, and the man was forced to walk before the people, wearing on his head a sack with all their sandals bundled into it.
She humiliated a schoolteacher who tried to trade grades for sex with the village children.
She challenged land and water rights. She argued for equal pay among men and women employed in famine relief works.
Her achievements brought her name to the attention of the chief minister of Rajasthan. The social scientists sponsoring the Women's Development Project considered her a model for what the effort could accomplish.
And in 1989, the program became a national model for combating conditions blamed for much of the violence endured by India's women.
"Until women are aware of their rights and what is happening to them, men find it difficult to change. They can depend on women for the continuance of the system," says P.A. Sebastian, secretary of the Indian Peoples Human Rights Commission in Bombay.
by CNB