This week we’ve witnessed another shameful chapter in independent India’s history.  I find myself very angry at having noted the priority – or lack of it – that the media has accorded to it. Baby Afreen is no more. Admittedly all the TV channels covered the issue, but was it given the importance it merited? To me the answer is a resounding no.

I am sure there is a personal dimension involved; for biologically childless individuals like me and some of my friends, the option of adoption offered a way out, and the recent deaths of Falak and Afreen have come as an affront to our dignity.

Is this the society we worked for? And are we so oblivious to the blatant injustice that is prevalent around us so as not to feel a sense of revulsion and outrage? Our entire society failed Afreen. Her religion, her country, her parents, the three pillars of governance and most importantly, the press. Surely, if there was a case to whip up public outrage this was it. I simply do not see any outrage.

Journalists would argue that it is not their job to stir up emotions – just to report facts. To a certain extent I would go along with that. But when there is an issue that has the potential to corrode society, then in every country that I have worked in I have witnessed journalists take positions.

I can never forget how the media reported the Leslie Ann Downie murder in the moors in England. The reporting was entirely fair, but it never pulled any punches. Myra Hindley was sentenced to life and the public outrage was such that she never qualified for parole even when she had demonstrated noticeable improvement in her character. And she eventually died in the prison. One may say – and some have said – that this was decidedly unfair. But the magnitude of her crime made it understandable and even card-carrying social liberals like myself took a backseat.

More recently we saw the British Press take positions in the Shilpa Shetty case which led to the expression of the massive revulsion against racism in that country.

I recall a conversation I had with Kate Adie, a leading British journalist. She was very clear that journalists are obliged to take positions on matters of egregious injustice. Her own personal position was that she studiously refrained from using adjectives, but always succeeded in making her point. She mentioned that she had not employed adjectives even while reporting an event as heinous as Denis Nelson’s multiple murders and post-homicidal mutilations. The public outcry had been intense.

And to my way of thinking, Afreen’s murder does qualify to be regarded as having sufficient egregiousness for journalists to be unequivocal.

Instead, until the time of writing what did I find? The news item was the fifth on the agenda of four national channels. One channel went into a graceless debate over whether the reporting of this incident by a foreign journalist was unfair to India. The noteworthy feature was that every channel has senior female journalists – and quite frankly I did not witness the outrage I would have expected.

To my reckoning this was just about as heinous a crime as one can imagine. A hapless three-month old was deprived of her right to live just because of her gender. And while I did not expect the issue to make headlines in the evening prime time news, I did regard it as having far greater importance than attempting to analyse political shenanigans with politicians and politically-mined journos.

Suffice it to say that had this occurred in the UK or the US or any Scandinavian country, the matter would not have been allowed to die down. So intense would have been the outcry from the Fourth Estate.

On two of the channels I noticed an expert who, while expressing customary revulsion, went on to say that female infanticide and foeticide are not unique to India. Shamefully, that happens to be true. And we have to analyse this problem here taking into account this social context.

Manusmriti had to say – a female is under the custody of males from womb to tomb. But it is still a fact that in some parts of Rajasthan and Punjab, female infanticide was practiced in the early 19th century and its incidence was high among the Jadeja Rajputs of Saurashtra in 1805. There were no daughters in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh during the same period. Thousands of foetuses are still being killed every year in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh to ensure that the desire for a male child is fulfilled. Though the practice is of recent origin among the Bhati community in Jaisalmer, their sex ratio is one of the lowest in the world (approximately 550). Psychological pain followed by sexual violence is the next hardship many women face in their marital relationship. There is also suffering due to social separation because the above hardships – dowry harassment, ridicule, dehumanizing treatment, caustic remarks, verbal abuse – contribute to the psychological pain inflicted on women. And because of societal pressures they learn to live with this psychological violence.

Baby Afreen is no more. The very least we can do to make sure that her unfortunate death does not go in vain is to shake off our apathy, both societal and in particular the journalistic apathy so that the message resounds loud and clear – that the Indian state will NOT tolerate another Afreen.

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