Twin infanticide: Jind village feels 'burden of shame'

Geetanjali Gayatri

Jind, July 29

Silence hangs heavy in Dhanoda as villagers go about their everyday chores. They are still recovering from the shock of twin nine-month-old girls being smothered by their mother, the arrival of the police, her subsequent arrest and the shame infanticide has brought with it.

Studied silence

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• Dhanoda villagers in shock over twin nine-month-old girls being smothered by mother
• Reluctantly admit crime took place in village, say no more
• No one willing to say if crime was due to gender of babies or discord between couple

They all reluctantly admit that the crime took place in the village, but say no more and simply walk off. A fortnight later, the two deaths are still shrouded in mystery and the only response any further questions elicit from the village women is cold calculated silence. Nobody is willing to explain if the infanticide was due to the gender of the babies or a discord between the couple, Jagdeep and Sheetal, or something else.

The village sarpanch, Jitender, explains. “Everything boils down to ‘honour’ in the village and that has been dented irreparably with this double infanticide. Though the village has no such history of discriminating against the girl child and despite it being the handiwork of one woman, the blot is on the name of the entire village,” he says, adding that everybody in the village of 1,800 families feels the shame so much that they don’t even discuss it among themselves.

Though Sheetal had gone to stay with her parents over three months ago, a panchayat was held on June 30 in which it was decided that Jagdeep would go and bring her back from her parents’ house in Sonepat. On July 5, Sheetal came back to the village with the twins and on July 11, she went to the local anganwadi for their routine check-up. “We hadn’t even sent her a message. She came on her own. They were absolutely healthy. Two days later, they were dead and nobody knows anything,” says an ASHA worker, who was tracking her right through her pregnancy.

Meanwhile, at his two-room house in the village, 33-year-old Jagdeep has not gone back to work. While he cooks lunch for himself, he says, “We got married a year and a half ago. This was my first marriage and Sheetal’s second marriage, and we met her family through a friend of mine, who works with me as a labourer. She was 10 years younger to me. We had twins last November and there has been no dispute between us ever.”

He came back from work in the afternoon on July 13 to find village women crowded inside his small house. “My wife was sitting beside their bodies on the charpoy and women were wailing all around. Two days after we buried them, my wife told my sister-in-law that she had suffocated them to death but I did not believe it,” he says.

However, as the news spread in the village, a panchayat was called where Sheetal admitted to killing her girls. “We told Jagdeep to immediately get an FIR registered and hand her over to the police. We knew it would bring a bad name to the village but we could not have kept this murder under wraps,” says the sarpanch.

While villagers are shocked that a mother could kill her daughters, they are also equally disturbed about the disrepute to their village. “This tag of being from a village where infanticide took place is following us everywhere. We are asked questions to which there are no answers. We are weighed down by the burden of this shame,” says a village woman. There is no escape from this, they rue.