“Are you passionate about adopting stray dogs, or saving tigers, the environment or girl child?”

This was the question posed to readers in The Asian Age newspaper (April 17, 2010, p.16)

Could the mass annihilation of any other human group—the Jews, Tutsis, or Armenians, be put forth in such terms by a major newspaper?
More than 50 million women have been exterminated in India. Killed through selected feticide –Infanticide — Dowry murders. It is a blood bath. A systematic and targeted annihilation. A fallout of a raging, lawless misogyny.
Yet India and the International organizations have stubbornly refused to recognize this as a legal and human rights issue. They have refused to treat this like any other genocide.
Instead the effort has been to de-humanize the issue. To treat it more like a problem of demography and gender ratios, or perhaps conservation, like that of tigers and pandas, as reflected in the newspaper article cited above.

Indeed, most campaigns and projects seem to be transplants of World Wild Life Fund projects to save endangered species of animals. “Save the Panda.” Hence “Save the Girl.” ‘Incentives’ are provided to communities to ‘conserve’ the girls! They are similarly supplemented with all the appropriate props – badges, posters, greeting cards and calendars. Buy these things to ‘save the girl.’
But who is saving the girl ?
Will we have a “reserve” for them like we do for Pandas?
Will we breed them, so we can have more of them for posterity?
Will we export samples of successfully ‘saved girls’ to the Washington National zoo, and give them peppy names like ‘Sita’ and Gita’ so excited children gape at them in glass cages?
What will it take for us to learn that ‘saving the girl’ is not a hobby?
When will we acknowledge that the Indian girl is not a panda?