The right of Rabina's unborn in the pot

Shreema Ningombam *

Doesn't the death have any right? Are rights solely for the living? Does the death pronounce the end of all rights?

Let us presume that economic, political and social dimensions of right die for the dead with the death. What about the right to dignity and respect? Do they too vanish with the death?

We live so nobly or at least pretend to in order to die with dignity. The death of a person does not have any significance to the dead herself but the death matters to the people who survived the death.

Giving respect to the death is giving respect to ourselves who are alive Rabina was seven months pregnant when she was shot death on 23th July 2009. Her death body lay on the street for hours and meanwhile the baby inside her died as well.

The baby could have been saved. She was pronounced death by the police not by a medical officer.

But the matter I want to deal is with the act of post mortem where the baby was taken out of the mother's womb and put in an earthen pot.

The question I would like to pose is does not the baby have the right to be in its mother's womb when Rabina was finally put to rest whether by cremation or by burial. In Meitei society dead pregnant woman is never cremated with the baby inside her because there is a saying that a pregnant woman cannot be cremated because it cannot be burnt fully.

It is first removed from her womb and put in an earthen pot and then buried. Socially understood is that a stillborn baby or a child died before two years of age is associated with ill-omen. And the baby is termed as 'soren'.

The baby is put inside an earthen pot and buried not cremated with the motive that it could not fulfill the human capacity of being born so it is condemned not to be reborn in ever again in this world.

The understanding is that the ritual is there for the good of the society that such 'soren' is never born. Its shows a ritual conducted to avoid still-born child in future. The killing of Rabina and Sanjit is unjust but what is more gruesome is the baby in the pot.

This is not done by law but by our beliefs and customs which says the baby cannot rest inside her mother's womb in the grave. This reminds me of Chenua Achebe's twins in his novel 'Things Fall Apart' written in the background of a tribe in Lower Niger. He writes the tribes had the custom of throwing away twins in jungle to die as it was understood in their society that twins represent evil.

Hermeneutically seen we can say it is as logical as any rigorous scientific logic and an undeniable social truth. How long are going to abstain from making a parameter for universal human justice? Are there no foundations of human justice or universal moral principle?

Scientifically the pregnant woman retains fluid in her body and amniotic fluid in her womb in which the foetus floats in the mother's womb make the dead mother very difficult to burn properly. Most likely it is difficult for the fire to consume the body rigorously.

Perhaps it is to save logs and firewood of burning that it is fixed as a ritual. This is just a hypothesis. In Rabina's case the child had nothing to do with the outcome. But the baby was made guilty and being taken away from its mother and put in the pot.

We have no regard for her motherhood, no regard for the baby's dignity of remaining inside her mother's womb eternally as he could never be born. We denied the right to the mother and her baby the right after death of being together.

And those who use the pictures of the 'pitiful', gross and grotesque sights of the dead bodies of Rabina and her baby in the pot are trying to show it to get attention; pitiable feelings form the public as well as the authority. Various organizations and individuals have capitalized on the incidents and its photographs.

Capitalism can sell anything. Are we going to use those pictures to provoke pity, sympathy or whatever it is from the authority to give up tyranny? No if we have to demand justice and if they have to give us then it must not be because the authority feels emotional, pity and sympathy for us but because we have the right to get our rights.

We have the right to live; the authority is not here to do charity to us so they should give rights because they feel bad for us. They are there because we put them there.

The state sponsored violence is visible so we know it is unjust yet the baby in pot is not made by the state but by our beliefs and our congenital practices and we must realize it is gross to the extreme. We talk only of visible forms of violence and injustice but we are oblivious of those forms of violence and injustice which runs subtly and swiftly in our society oblivious of anyone's notice.

The social norms and entrenched customs are much more violent and unjust than the visible laws like the Arms Forces Special Power Acts.

These norms like the anatomy of Foucault's notion of power runs in a capillary form, seeping in every pore of our lives. They denounce us, condemn us make us feel wretched yet we all are in an illusion of getting civilized and salvaged by following such norms.

These norms do not spare even the dead. Sometimes one is condemned before one is born. How long are we going to remain silent?