Sunil Sethi: How backward is Delhi's backyard?

AL FRESECO

The late economic historian Dharma Kumar used to say that she could hardly think of a more unfortunate situation in life than to be poor in India and probably no greater hardship than being poor and female.

The burden of Prof Kumar's academic research had led her to investigate bonded labour practices in south India in the 19th and 20th centuries. She knew what she was talking about.

Although at first glance, the tragic Gudiya-Arif-Taufiq triangle, played out live in the media this week, bears a superficial resemblance to a glutinous Bollywood melodrama, it is actually a story of human bondage in which a poor woman in shining India of the 21st century has no choice and no voice.

It mitigates against the most fundamental of human rights""the right of personal liberty""to take decisions about deeply personal matters. Instead, eight months' pregnant Gudiya, burning with fever, has had to publicly submit to the wishes of her family, her community, and her faith. She cannot exercise the most basic freedom of all, the right to choose her life partner, in accordance with her will.

That she has had to make her decision before an avid audience of millions is humiliating enough. That the whole sordid business happened in Delhi's TV studios and the villages and kasbahs well within the National Capital Region (Pataudi, the small town Taufiq comes from in Haryana, and Arif's village outside Meerut in Uttar Pradesh are just over an hour's drive from Delhi) shows how backward and retrograde life remains in the neighbourhood of the emancipated, socially progressive, media-crazed capital of India.

Exactly how backward is Delhi's backyard? Go no further than the data in the recently-released and controversial first census report with a religion-wise break-up of the population. In its opening statements the report bluntly states that Haryana recorded the lowest literacy level of 40 per cent among the country's Muslim population.

Literacy among Muslim women in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh""21.5 per cent and 37.4 per cent, respectively""is among the lowest among India's female population, beaten only by figures for Bihar and certain northeastern states.

Study after study confirms the worst imaginable facts. According to one recent survey, 59 per cent of Muslim women in India have never attended school; and the average age of marriage (17 years) and work participation levels (14 per cent) are lower than those for Hindu women.

Any surprise that Gudiya, married at the age of 14 for 10 days to a soldier who seemingly disappeared forever, could have ended up as anything but a pawn in a bitter tussle between two husbands and their village panchayats?

Almost as ugly is the sort of mutual barter going on at the moment between Gudiya's two husbands over the matter of her unborn child. Arif says he will keep her but not the baby, and Taufiq says, all right, he will bring up the baby to start with and hand it over to Gudiya and Arif after it's grown up.

How much have things really changed since Dharma Kumar conducted her studies among the poor rural population to come to her grim conclusion.

No one comes clean, or even sane, out of this deadly triangle, neither the Shariat-spouting maulvis, nor the media or votaries of panchayati raj, and not even the Indian army.

How on earth did the army declare Mohd Arif and his fellow jawan Jagbir Singh as "deserters" when the two men had accidentally strayed across into enemy territory in 1999 and been taken prisoner by Pakistani forces?

After all, Arif and Jagbir were serving right on the LoC in Kargil. Was it not incumbent upon their officers to immediately initiate an inquiry as to how two soldiers from their company had disappeared overnight from a remote border area? Or is this sort of vanishing trick so commonplace on Indian frontiers that regiments don't particularly notice or care?

It was not, in fact, until December 2003, when Pakistan's law enforcement agency informed India that it was holding two PoWs, that the Indian army woke up to the awful realisation about what happened""the "deserters" were alive and due to come back.

By then greater tragedies had befallen Arif. His parents had died and the sad, ignorant teenage bride he had left behind had been bulldozed into another marriage.

Mohd Arif is now in a good position to challenge the Rip van Winkle behaviour of the Indian army and collect damages for his anguish. Perhaps that will be some recompense for a secure future for Gudiya and her child.