Gender Agenda newsletter | From love to murder

Last week, I felt a punch in the gut when I read the story of a man from Nanded in Maharashtra who killed his six-year-old daughter. My colleague, Marri Ramu, reported that the man had three children. He wanted his wife to contest the panchayat elections, but Maharashtra’s two-child rule stood in the way. He first decided to give his son up for adoption, but seeing how complicated that could become, he decided that the best option would be to kill his daughter. He drove to neighbouring Telangana, threw her into a canal, and walked away, even as she cried ‘Papa, Papa’ in fear and confusion before drowning.

How could the life of his daughter be less valuable to him than a local political post? How could a child be seen as an obstacle? More chillingly, the report said he adored her. How could love collapse so completely in the face of blinding ambition?

In India, daughters have been killed for many reasons. Producing sons was — and still is, in many cases and places — seen as enhancing a woman’s status. In the early 1980s, a report in The Statesman by Ritambara Shastri spoke of a private medical practitioner and his gynaecologist wife in Amritsar who charged ₹500 to reveal the sex of foetuses. Mothers from Kerala, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Jammu and Kashmir, and Madhya Pradesh, the report said, terminated pregnancies if the foetus was female — and sent letters of gratitude to the doctors.

Female foeticide was also common to uphold “family honour”. Chitra Mudgal in the book, Between the Bylines, reproduces accounts from a jailer’s diary. One mother, constantly humiliated for giving birth to girl children, finally gave all four of them arsenic and swallowed some herself. The children died; she survived and went to jail.

In the 1980s and 1990s, female infanticide was rampant in Usilampatti near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, where daughters were seen as economic liabilities. Fearing dowry, villagers poisoned newborn girls with oleander seeds or fed them milk laced with pesticides.

Thankfully, a lot has changed since these episodes. Thanks to the law banning sex determination, constant administrative monitoring, government campaigns, and improved education levels, the sex ratio at birth has improved steadily over the decades.

And yet, the mindset that enables this violence is still firmly in place. Last year, another “doting” father shot his daughter dead in Gurugram. The woman was a tennis player and ran a sports academy; the father had supported her career all her life. “When I went to Wazirabad to fetch milk, people in the village taunted me for living off my daughter’s earnings. It hurt my honour and self-respect,” he said in this story, reported by Ashok Kumar.

Daughters are no longer killed only because they are unwanted. They are sometimes killed even when they are loved — when they, for no fault of their own, threaten the man’s ambitions or succeed in their own careers, threatening fragile ideas of masculinity and honour. These stories show that the best and the worst of India coexist within the same families, sometimes within the same fathers. And that is what should truly frighten us.

Toolkit

Escalera, a large-scale expo held in Kerala, has created a space where women entrepreneurs can share experiences, learn from one another, and gain the confidence to move forward despite challenges. The entrepreneurs’ expo featured over 120 stalls run by nearly 200 women entrepreneurs. The women said their toughest hurdle was not production, marketing, or sales; it was being taken seriously. Read the report here.

Wordsworth

Women’s Time Poverty: As women carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid labour at home and caregiving, they are able to contribute only about 18% to India’s GDP. “It is important, therefore, to explicitly value, free up, and productively redistribute women’s time. The Union Budget, particularly the gender budget, is a powerful instrument to enable this outcome,” write Shravani Prakash, Tanu Goyal, and Anjhana Ramesh. They outline five ways of unlocking women’s time here.

Ouch!

You know she’s a young woman — I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. I’ve known you for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face. You know why you’re not smiling? Because you know you’re not telling the truth.

U.S. President Donald Trump to CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins when she asked about redactions in the Epstein Files

People we met

Jyoti Ravi Chaubey
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Chappan Dukan is a bustling street food hub in Indore. On a weekday evening, the stalls are crowded and the air is thick with the aroma of spices. In this male-dominated market, Jyoti Ravi Chaubey is one of the few exceptions. The culinary force behind FOODONS, Chaubey is also one of the few, or perhaps only, one in the market with experience in a high-end restaurant. As she makes delicious moong dal chillas, Chaubey tells me that she has broadly gone through four stages in her journey. “The first was the stares I got. Everyone thought I had mistakenly come to their territory. Then, I got a lot of advice. People thought I wasn’t going to last long. Then, when I proved myself, people started seeing me as a threat. My water supply was stopped and my advertising boards were torn apart, illegal stalls came up right in front of my shop… But finally, I realised that people had just accepted I was going to be there. Some of them now tell me I am successful because of the support they gave me!” As a woman, she says she has had to fight not just people in the market but at home as well.

Published – February 08, 2026 07:20 pm IST