No, this is not about the Rupert Murdoch farce (on which any further comment would be superfluous and unnecessary), but something a little smaller in proportion and equally shocking in its amorality. The Hindustan Times published a front-page report in June entitled “Docs turn scores of baby girls into boys”, documenting what was later found to be a mendacious practice of converting female children into males in Indore against their will, and reporting it to be proof of the heavy cultural bias against females in India.
“Girls are being ‘converted’ into boys,” the article says, “in Indore – by the hundreds every year – at ages where they cannot give their consent for this life-changing operation. This shocking, unprecedented trend catering to the fetish for a son is unfolding at conservative Indore’s well-known clinics and hospitals on children who are 1-5 years old. The process being used to ‘produce’ a male child from a female is known as genitoplasty…. Moreover, these children are pumped with hormonal treatment as part of the sex change procedure that may be irreversible.”
As it turns out, these shocking facts are not really facts at all, but fiction contrived by amoral journalists hungry to create a sensation that would help them to outshine their competitors. In what is proving to be the age of obfuscation, it does not appear as though we can rely any longer on the media for the truth. Anyone who has read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can imagine how stultifying historical revisionism is. An Op-Ed article in The Hindu expands on this mendacity.
“Senior doctors say the operation… is medically impossible…. [A doctor was quoted as saying:] ‘It is medically impossible to change a female child into a male. In fact, the opposite may be possible’ …. So what is the ‘controversial’ operation that the doctors of Indore are actually performing? It seems to be a corrective surgery, regularly recommended by pediatricians when faced with a child with congenital abnormality of the genitalia…. ‘It’s about making a child a better male, functionally or structurally. It’s not about converting a child’s sex.’ … Ironically, the HT article quotes the Indore doctors also saying that the operation is performed on children with ambiguous or abnormal genitalia…. But there is no explanation of why these babies are to be arbitrarily considered “girls” if they have male organs; in fact, sexual identity is determined by a wide range of factors, including genetic and chromosomal make-up, external appearance, and the rearing of a child.” The article goes on to quote an editor of the Hindustan Times: “‘We never said anywhere in the article that they are perfectly healthy baby girls being converted.’” (Lies and equivocations on top of everything else: Read the headline of the HT article, if you’re not convinced.)
Obscurely, at the end of the HT article, the reporter concedes that there was a medical reason for performing the surgeries – not “parents blindly demanding a boy child.” But that is in direct contradiction to what they said in the first paragraph about son fetishism – as disgusting a concept as that is. The doctors who were quoted in the article told The Hindu that none of what they were alleged to have said was true. Things they had never said were attributed to them. As if this weren’t ridiculous enough, the HT continued to equivocate, neither taking any responsibility for the outrage nor denying its falsehood. In a smaller scale, a similar act would have been condemned as childish and irrational: in its actual scale, it is indicative of a deeper truth, a subconscious social predisposition toward moral self-destruction.
Most significantly, the writer of the article in The Hindu blatantly ignores the obvious implications of this heinous act: that amoral journalists are taking advantage of the feminist-driven political scene by digging into sensitive political issues, and spewing any kind of nonsense they can come up with to spark off a controversy and increase their readership. Even at the end of the Op-Ed article, the issue was still treated as infidelity to facts and a case of irresponsible journalism rather than a malicious, irrational, and outrageously immoral attempt to slander honest doctors and a legitimate, beneficial medical practice. Just like locusts, journalists nowadays attack anything and everything in sight when they run out of big news. And please, the last thing feminists need is for nihilistic journalists to give credence to their psychedelic claims.
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Sometime ago, a centuries-old fortune worth $22 billion was uncovered at the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala. The Supreme Court will decide what will be done with the money. Meanwhile, a naïvely optimistic professor has suggested that the money be invested in building India’s first “truly outstanding university”. The suggestion in itself is not bad. The IITs and IIMs are not strictly universities, and there is a need to rejuvenate the country’s philosophic state by fostering interest in the arts and humanities – especially when global terrorism is starting to become more threatening and more far-reaching than ever before, and people are becoming increasingly indifferent to matters of morality.
Why I call this professor naïve is that he envisions this world-class university as being built in Kerala and being purely meritocratic. Again, the idea is very good. But Kerala, as everyone knows, has a communist government; and communism, as everyone knows, is a degenerative political philosophy whose adherents couldn’t possibly dream of spending $22 billion on educating people. Moreover, the rampant corruption among Indian politicians of any political alignment would never allow that much money to be invested in projects that don’t benefit them directly and substantially. It’s a good idea, and a good dream, but not one that is viable unless the degeneracy of the Indian politicians is done away with first, as unlikely as that is.
The overwhelming majority of Indian politicians are corrupt, and have all the makings of the common dictator, like Hitler or Stalin. The only thing that prevents India from becoming a dictatorship is the fact that every politician plots the downfall of every other politician. They are voted into power purely by the use of ad hominem speeches on a largely ignorant and easily swayed population. It is no longer a case of choosing the best candidate, and perhaps it never was: it’s about choosing the least evil option.
The professor errs on one count. He suggests that there be no reservations in his dream university, but that a slight consideration be given to able students from disadvantaged families. It’s a good idea, since it’s more profitable in every sense to invest in smart children from poor families than in stupid children from rich families. A good way to do this would be to introduce a financial aid system and a good scholarship system. Unfortunately, the Indian economy might not be able to afford that – much less the economy of a communist state like Kerala. Which means that it certainly won’t be possible to build this outstanding, world-class university anytime in the foreseeable future; and in the meantime, the money will be up for grabs.
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