The heart-wrenching incidents of neonate abandonment are on rise in Srinagar, a recent instance occurred on Friday last week in Nowhatta Srinagar, where a lifeless newborn was found lying on the road. A telling picture of this nameless infant was shared widely on Facebook and thus invoking anger and dismay among the netizens over the bestial treatment of this infant; as usual, the outrage began and ended on our phones.
If we were going to take previous such incidents into consideration, in order to study the societal pattern of responses towards the desertion of infants, what we will get to know is that people have been simply indifferent to this social evil. Over and above no social, political or religious organsiation has taken any cognizance of these atrocious acts, but what if this baby in Nowhatta would have been lying dead on the road due to some other reasons, and had he been hit by pellets or bullets; we could have witnessed a different reaction altogether. If pellets and bullets would have made him a victim of state cruelty, we would have been on the roads protesting but because this injustice was done to the newborn by someone amongst us, we are muted. The comparison that I am drawing here may sound absurd to many people, but I don’t find any other way to expose the double standards in our society.
The deplorable acts of infant abandonment take place in every corner of the world but the same should not become an excuse for us to brush such acts under the carpet. Making assumptions for the sake of change is not bad. In that case, one such assumption would be that it is due to the lack of public institutions that our society is witnessing this social evil. In presence of institutions, if a person is not willing to own a child for any reason whatsoever, he/she can handover the same to an orphanage and this way a life could be saved.
We also cannot dismiss the possibility of poor economic backgrounds as being a reason of this social evil. The government and society should come up with a mechanism which will establish the measure of poverty among the poor. This way we can recognise the problems of poor people that have been either ignored or taken lightly by the society in general and it is these problems which often pave a way for social evils. Some people regard moral decline as the reason for rise in newborn abandonment incidents in Kashmir but I want to question such people that why this ‘moral decline’ is not taken into account when it comes to our obligations towards the society.
According to media reports, at least 5 infants (girl child) were abandoned inside the LD maternity hospital, Srinagar, in last one month, and a few people have came forward to adopt these newborn infants which is certainly a compassionate act. If someone is being humane towards the abandoned infants, it is undoubtedly praise worthy but it should not encourage us to remain silent and eschew the inhumane acts of infant abandonments; rather, we should try to find the reasons behind this disturbing trend in our society. One thing about the infant forsaking is certain that such acts cannot be performed by a single person; instead, these acts are being executed by a certain group of people.
While I was sketching an outline of this article, I inquired from some middle-aged men that if they have witnessed any baby abandonments cases before 5-10 years. One person told me that he has been a witness to such instances wherein trunk boxes were abandoned on roofs of buses which on inspection would contain dead body of an infant and also dead babies were draped with towels and then left inside the passenger vehicles. All of these persons whom I talked to about this disturbing social evil told me one thing in common that is “before several years, these acts would not go unnoticed in the society and people always used to raise their voice against these inhumane acts but today people are maintaining a stoic silence over this issue which is really disheartening.”
Infant abandonment is an act of utmost savagery, and another form of murder. Without social intervention, this social evil cannot be rooted out.
