Why Baby Falak had to die

“Baby Falak” has become shorthand for cases of battered babies inIndia, especially for girls unwanted by their parents. And such stories have risen in the news pecking order,” Krishna Pokharel and Paul Beckett observes towards the end of their series Baby Falak on Wall Street Journal, India Realtime blog.

The six-part series walks the reader down the underbelly of the country, where a fourteen-year-old girl’s survival options are marriage to a much older man or prostitution, where children are ‘passed on’, where falling in love is either censured or reprimanded by the family, where wife-beaters are not an aberration.

Falak, as traced by WSJ’s series, stands for the great socio-economic divide inIndiathat sends children shuttling across trafficking, prostitution, abuse and sends them to the doors of a system that is so immune to child deaths, that it is no great tragedy to work on for them.

The series starts off with Munni Khatun’s  (Falak’s mother) life in her village in Bihar. It follows her journey from being the youngest daughter of a man of some importance in her village to a woman punished by her family for marrying against their wishes. The section ends with Munni wanting to running away with her three children, lured by the promise of marriage by a man she ran into in the village.

The second section talks about her ’new life’ where Munni is first asked to prostitute herself then separated from her children and sold off in marriage to a Rajasthan farmer. It also recounts how her three children landed with three different families.

The third section conveys the story of Gudiya, the fourteen year old, who reportedly battered Falak.

The fourth, fifth and the sixth sections trace Falak’s  last days in AIIMS, Gudiya’s recounting of a life of abuse and the media frenzy that shot Falak to the headlines and TV screens. It ends with Falak’s cremation and how Falak’s story died for mass media, with her.

The last available report published by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) puts the number of child victims of crimes at 26,694. A figure than includes more than 5000 cases of rape, nearly 200 recorded cases of girls being sold and bought, more than 700 abandonment and close to 1500 murders. The numbers belong to 2010 of which the NCRB published a report in 2011.

It was noted that compared to the previous year (2009), the number of minor girls being ‘procured’ for prostitution had risen by 187 percent. Barkha Dutt echoes the feeling in the WSJ article, “Barkha Dutt, group editor for the channel, said in an interview that it is highly unusual for a story about a child in distress to gain so much attention.”

Data provided by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights says, the commission, in the period from 1 April, 2010 to 15 February 2012, had dealt with just 1326 cases of crimes against children.

In a particularly engaging section, the report relates how Gudiya, who allegedly beat up Falak which led to the baby’s death was first beaten up by her father, then raped repeatedly by the husband of a woman she sought shelter from and then passed on to several other racketeers who earned thousands she didn’t herself see signs of. It says, her relationship with Rajkumar, a man twice her age, was of ‘love’.

“After marriage, I didn’t do prostitution nor did Rajkumar tell me to do prostitution,” the story quotes Gudiya from a court document. Gudiya took good care of Falak at first, doctors at AIIMS noticed how the battered child was ‘well-fed’ and otherwise ‘healthy’.

It’s not difficult to understand a much abused fourteen-year-old flying into rage. In India, it’s probably not difficult to even understand, how she was pushed to that brink.