India yet to ban female genital mutilation among a Muslim community
by Ignatius Chithelen, author Passage from India to America*
In July 1973, I was at the start of my third year for a degree in chemistry at Wilson College, Mumbai. During a laboratory class, the instructor looked at the color of the liquids in my test tube and said that my results were wrong. I asked Shahnaz**, who was working near me, for help. As the academic year progressed, she and her friends Flora and Varsha, would often laugh and tell me I was a buddhu (a dumb guy) when I could not follow their instructions for a lab experiment.
Always dressed in a salwar kameez, Shahnaz was a thin, small woman with glasses, who spoke softly but was feisty. She was a top student in the class of about 150, studying for a major in microbiology, the most sought degree at Wilson. She was engaged to a man from her Muslim Bohra community, following an arranged marriage set up by their two families.
The next year, I switched to studying philosophy at the morning section at Elphinstone College, Mumbai, and so did not see the three of them. In 1994, during a visit to Mumbai from New York, I ran into Varsha and her husband at a Chinese restaurant near Churchgate station. She told me that Shahnaz and her husband had moved to the U.S., and Flora had emigrated with her family to Israel.
Shock and trauma at age seven
Yesterday I was reminded about Shahnaz, after I came across a petition. “At the age of seven, I was subjected to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Mumbai…The shock and trauma of that day are still with me,” begins the petition by Masooma Ranalvi, co-signed by sixteen other Bohra women in India. Ranalvi, 53, now a publisher in Delhi, was taken to a clandestine, unhygienic clinic near a Bohra mosque in the Bhendi Bazaar area of Mumbai, by her grandmother who told her she was treating her to a special chocolate tasting.
FGM “is the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons,” as a UN document describes it. Some communities believe that FGM “is required for a girl’s proper upbringing, marriage or to maintain the family’s honour,” notes an Amnesty International Report on FGM in India. The practice has no health benefits, damages or removes healthy and normal female genital tissue, and interferes with the natural functions of the body. Immediate complications include severe pain, excessive bleeding, problems urinating and in some cases even death. Long-term it can lead to cysts, infections and complications during childbirth.
The cutting itself can be traumatic for survivors and can cause lasting psychological consequences. Since girls from birth to 15 years are usually the victims, FGM is a criminal act, as it violates a child’s rights to be protected from violence and develop in a healthy manner, says Amnesty International and other civil rights groups.
Cutting among Bohras in India
A UNICEF report released this month estimated that over 200 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM worldwide, mainly in 29 African and Middle Eastern countries. The worst offenders include Egypt with over 27 million victims, Ethiopia with 24 million and Nigeria with 20 million. On May 2, Sudan, which has over 12 million victims, banned the practice and instituted three year jail terms for those who promote, assist and carry it out. But it continues in India, which had a woman Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister and whose current Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he is building the country into a global economic power.
In India FGM is known as “khatna” or “khafz” and involves the removal of the clitoral hood and/or the clitoris. It is practiced among Bohras, a community of roughly 1.5 million Shia Muslims, roughly half of whom live in the Indian states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala and half in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe and Africa. While there are different Bohra groups, the majority of them belong to the Dawoodi Bohra sect.
Secrecy and denial
There is much secrecy over FGM in India, even as UN agencies and other groups have well-documented how it is carried out in other parts of the world. While I had read about the practice in Africa and the Middle East, and try to follow the major news from India, I was surprised to learn about it among Bohras only yesterday.
In 2018, a survey of Bohras in India by WeSpeakOut, a group of survivors including Ranalvi, found that three quarters of daughters were victims of FGM. The group - and others like Sahiyo which also operates in the U.S. - use talks, media interviews and videos to try to convince Bohras in India and abroad to stop the practice. As Ranalvi wrote in Scroll, “many mothers, daughters, grandmothers follow tradition blindly, unquestioningly, ignorantly and clandestinely. Most do not understand the consequences for girls and their future.”
Educated, affluent Muslims practice FGM
While most Muslims in India are poor and many without college degrees, the Bohras are the most well educated – both men and women - and affluent Muslims. Most of them run businesses, mainly trading, or work as doctors,scientists, lawyers, accountants, and in other professions. They also generously fund numerous health, education and other charities in India.
Prominent Bohras in India include Azim Premji, the founder of Wipro, the global information technology company, who studied at Stanford, has an estimated net worth of $6 billion and is a major philanthropist who signed the giving pledge organized by Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates; Yusuf Hamied, the Cambridge educated chemist whose father started the generic drug maker Cipla, with a market value of over $65 billion, and whose daughter Samina Vaziralli is executive vice-chairperson; and Habil Khorakiwala, with an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion, who founded the generic drug company Wockhardt.
More a cult
As a father of two daughters I cannot understand why Bohra parents, especially the majority who have a good education, participate in an act that physically and psychologically scars their daughters from age seven. The explanation offered is that the tight knit community blindly follows the practices of the faith as well as the dictates of the Syedna, the supreme and hereditary leader of the religion, in large part due to social and economic pressures.
Mufaddal Saifuddin, the current Syedna of the Dawoodi group, is based in Mumbai like his predecessors. He oversees a centralized clergy which controls every aspect of a Bohra’s life from education and business to marriage and burial. Those who oppose FGM, or any action of the clergy, are ex-communicated from the faith and face social boycott, including by parents and other family members as well as divorce by their spouses.
The Syedna also supervises several Bohra foundations, reportedly holding billions of dollars in financial, real estate and other assets. The foundations and the clergy are funded by fees charged for all religious ceremonies, “taxes” on businesses and through donations. Some of the foundations provide interest free or low interest loans to Bohras for a range of needs including education, buying homes and setting up businesses. But anyone who is ex-communicated from the faith, like Ranalvi and her group, cannot receive such financial support.
In 2011, all Dawoodi Bohras had to go to a mosque and get photographed for a new identity card. The card, necessary for entry to any Bohra facility, has an in-built radio frequency identification chip. The new cards were “an expression of joy and gratitude for our spiritual leader,” a spokesperson for the Syedna wrote in an email to a Times of India reporter. He added that the card will enable a Bohra to attend mosques, visit shrines, get entry to religious and cultural events, solemnize marriages, participate in a Quran memorization competition and take part in a community organized car rally. The new ID card hence enables the clergy to track and evaluate every activity they expect of a Bohra. This has reinforced the view among some that the religion operates like a cult.
Using financial pressure?
It appears that the clergy’s monitoring of the Bohras also extends to its FGM mandate. But how do they find out if parents are following the practice? Do mothers swipe their ID cards at the clinics to register their compliance? Or is the tracking done by requiring the presence of a clergyman, or their staff, who also record the names? Or is it done by those who run the clinics, who are Bohras likely beholden to the clergy for being approved for the practice and hence providing them with a source of income? Since FGM is a religious ritual, do the clergy charge the parents a fee, which could also help with the monitoring?
Questions about clergy supervision are closely tied to questions about how financial issues may restrict a parent’s choice. Will parents, who protect a daughter from the practice, be denied a loan by the foundations run by the clergy? If a Bohra owes money on a loan, which he cannot repay soon, does he feel compelled to have his daughters undergo FGM? Do such indebted parents face pressure, subtle or even direct, from the clergy and their staff? Among the 25% of parents, in the WeSpeakOut survey, whose daughters did not undergo FGM, did most or all of them have good finances, with no loans due to the foundations? Answers to these questions may help explain why most Bohras, even with college and professional degrees, are not abandoning the practice and protecting their daughters.
Syedna supports Prime Minister Modi
So far FGM is banned in 59 countries, with implementation of the laws being strictly enforced in most Western countries while the punishment of violators are few, if any, in many of the African and Middle Eastern countries. However, even in the Western countries, some Bohras - as well as African and Middle Eastern immigrants - continue the practice in hidden ways, as Tasneem Raja, a victim in the U.S. relates. Fearing jail due to rising scrutiny, some Bohra parents in the U.S. and other western countries take their daughters on cutting vacation trips to India.
Ranalvi and her group are pursuing various paths to get FGM banned in India and jail terms for those who propagate, perpetuate and support it: submitting a petition, organizing protests (see photo,) appealing to the Supreme Court and writing an open letter to Prime Minister Modi. However the Syedna supports Modi and invites him to major ceremonies. In turn, the Prime Minister meets with Bohras on his visits to the U.S., Australia and other countries. Through publicity from such gatherings, Modi is apparently trying to show that he is well liked by Muslims. But since he became Prime Minister in 2014, influential media outlets in the west regularly carry stories of Muslims being lynched and Modi’s government not punishing the Hindu extremists responsible for the crimes.
Bohra clergyman charged in Australia
Given the links between Modi and the Syedna, Ranalvi and her group face a tough challenge. They see hope from the outcome of a criminal trial in Australia. In 2015, following an anonymous tip and an investigation, prosecutors in Australia charged three people, including a Bohra clergyman, for violating a law that bans FGM. The story about the case on the Australian news site ABC.net carries this sub-title - Warning: This story contains graphic details that may confront some readers.
In 2018, an Australian judge ruled in the case that a “strong message should be sent to male Dawoodi Bohra religious leaders that criminal acts…for the purpose of covering up the performance of ‘khatna’ and deflecting a police investigation of FGM offences, ought be met by sentences of full-time imprisonment.” Last year, the High Court in Australia ruled that female genital mutilation is illegal in its various forms, including where there is no visible physical damage. The court asked a lower court to decide on penalizing the three defendants.
Fearing that a Bohra clergyman may be jailed for violating Australia’s law, the Bohra “clergy suddenly passed 17 resolutions aimed at Bohras living in western countries where FGM is banned,” warning them not to continue the practice, writes Ranalvi.
Achieving a ban in India will be much easier through pressure from global public opinion, including on major Bohra business owners who depend on markets, technologies and capital from western countries. Meanwhile her group’s petition is addressed to seven officials in India, including the union ministers of health and justice and the chief ministers of Delhi and Madhya Pradesh. As of today, it has gotten over 201,000 signatures.