Female Genital Mutilation: The Unkindest Cut

KERALA-BASED NOVELIST andliter­ature festival curator Sabin Iqbal recalls his mother telling him in 2010 that fe­male genital mutilation (FGM), which involves partial or total removal of the clitoris, was done in a “hush-hush” manner in parts of his home district of Thiruvananthapuram. “Not in our area, but in Vallakkadavu, Poonthura, etc. The practice is prevalent in utmost secrecy,” she told him when he asked her about the practice.

There was a reason why he had quizzed his mother. He was working on a story back then based on a Kenyan wom­an’s experience of this cruel and painful procedure. While on a visit to Kerala, she decided to share it, and for Iqbal it was a story he wrote for a now-defunct news portal called Yentha. Thanks to his mother’s revelation, he added a few lines stat­ing that the practice wasn’t confined to Africa or the Dawoodi Bohra community spread across India, but also among Sun­nis in pockets of Kerala.

A new report released on July 8 in Thiruvananthapuram—as the country awaits a verdict by the Supreme Court on the subject—proves beyond doubt that FGM, whether viewed as a proce­dure or a ritual, is a far bigger menace in India than previously believed. The report titled “Understanding Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting” published by anti-FGM collective WeSpeakOut and authored by Nevin Sulthan SN and Nawmi Naz Chowdhury concludes that “the resistance of the Indian state to recognise the exis­tence of the practice in some communities in many states in the country, including in Kerala, will prevent India from achieving its Sustainable Development Goals, particularly 5.3, which speaks of the elimination of all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation”. WeSpeakOut envisages eliminating the prac­tice of FGM, also referred to as Khafz/Khafd, which a United Nations report describes as “a human rights violation that inflicts lifelong suffering on millions of women and girls”. It has no health benefits and leaves survivors with long-lasting physical and psychological trauma, the report adds, emphasis­ing that an estimated 230 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM and that the number is simply rising despite the world embracing modernity, including in India.

While other Muslim denominations in India are secretive about the practice, the Bohra community leaders have earned the notoriety of displaying the chutzpah for insisting that it is a religious practice. A group called Dawoodi Bohra Women’s As­sociation for Religious Freedom (DBWRF) says on its website that they advocate for the rights of Dawoodi Bohra women in India to ensure that the women “live with dignity and hon­our and are able to exercise their religious & cultural rights, including their right to practise Khafz”. DBWRF speaks at the behest of Dr Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, the influential reli­gious leader of close to 12 lakh Bohra Muslims in the country.

Again, a report published by Orchid Project and the Asia Network based on three surveys done between 2017 and 2021 notes that the prevalence of FGM is estimated to be between 75 per cent and 85 per cent among the Dawoodi Bohra women; it also found that girls are typically subject to FGM between the ages of six and nine. The new report from Kerala states that in the state, it is often done on the 40th day after a girl’s birth. It points out that FGM is done by traditional cutters who are called ossathis (female barbers). For men, circumcision is done by ossas (male traditional cutters).

Now, coming back to Kerala, shortly after Iqbal penned his report, he received calls from some people asking how he dared to write about a ritual that was kept under wraps. Since those were days before social media trolling, he was spared that ordeal. But then it couldn’t be hidden for long.

Giving a background of how FGM cases came to light in Ker­ala, besides Tamil Nadu and other parts of the country among non-Bohras, the new report states that it was the anti-FGM advocacy group Sahiyo that provided proof of the practice in Kerala’s Kozhikode in 2017. “That report revealed that a clinic in Kozhikode had two doctors who admitted to performing ‘sunnath’ (FGM/C) on girls. The doctors noted that they cut the prepuce (clitoral hood) of patients from local Muslim sects who had requested the practice for themselves, their daughters, or daughters-in-law. Later, a Malayalam newspaper, Mathrubhumi, conducted an undercover investigation to confirm the story. Fol­lowing this, Shani S.S, a PhD student at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, wrote a piece in Mathrubhumi newspaper on her ex­perience as a survivor of FGM in Kerala.”

Among the minority yet influential Bohra community, a subsect of the Ismaili branch of Shia Islam, the shroud of se­crecy around FGM disappeared earlier than in Kerala after sur­vivors began to speak out and global reports started to surface. Masooma Ranalvi, lawyer and member of WeSpeakOut, wrote a column on NDTV website titled “I Was Circumcised When I Was a Girl of 7” in October 2015. Ranalvi, who is now based out of Goa, tells Open in an interview that “externally the practice is invisible because it operates within the family, involving only women, making it a highly secretive affair”. Around the time Ranalvi wrote her column about the trauma that she had lived with all her life—of her grandmother, promising ice cream and chocolate, took her to a Bohra Mohalla in the bylanes of Mumbai’s Bhendi Bazaar where a strange woman performed on her what she later realised was FGM—far away in Australia, the Supreme Court of New South Wales convicted three members of the diasporic Da­woodi Bohra community for performing the procedure on young children, creating ripples within the community worldwide.

Now, the matter is in court in India. The Supreme Court has reviewed the petitions in favour as well as against a ban on FGM. Raju Ramachandran, a senior Supreme Court advocate and for­mer additional solicitor general, tells Open that he expects the verdict to be positive. Ramachandran, who handles cases relat­ing to the rights of Bohra women, says that the court will look at whether the “Essential Religious Practice” (ERP) doctrine extends to practices violating bodily integrity and privacy. As is well known, he points out, the extent of the ERP doctrine places greater emphasis on fundamental right to privacy, dignity, and personal liberty. Meanwhile, DBWRF has argued that khafz is a centuries-old essential religious practice. Oral statements so far from the Supreme Court’s nine-judge Constitution Bench have repeatedly suggested that no religious custom has the right to violate the bodily privacy and integrity of women and minor girls.

During recent hearings, the bench has said that FGM does not enjoy constitutional immunity as an essential practice and falls squarely within the “public health” and “morality” exceptions that limit the right to freedom of religion. As of now, the court has clubbed the FGM petitions with other cases of religious freedom.

For her part, Toronto-based anti-FGM activist and WeSpeakOut co-founder Farzana Doctor says that she is delighted that a legal body has given priority to women’s rights over so-called religious rights that encroach on to the former. She is glad that the silence is finally broken, silence that gave licence to religious heads to trample upon women with their patriarchal mindset. “This one is not a religious issue, but a cultural one,” Doctor says, adding that in her reviews of the practice along with her comrades she has come across the practice among members of evangelical Christians, too, among the whites of Canada besides in some countries in South America.

According to a recent WHO report, in 2026 alone, an estimated 4.5 million girls—many under the age of five—are at risk of FGM. It adds that FGM compro­mises girls’ and women’s physical and mental health and can lead to serious, lifelong complications with treatment costs estimated at about $1.4 billion ev­ery year. According to the latest UNICEF data, FGM is high in Somalia, Guinea, and Djibouti apart from countries like Mali, Sierra Leone and Eritrea. It has also been widely reported in Burkina Faso, Gambia, Mauritania, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Guinea- Bissau. Other affected nations include Su­dan, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Chad, and Indonesia. The practice spans over 90 countries, including pockets in South America (such as Colombia and Peru) and migrant com­munities in North America, Australia, and Europe, data shows.

In India, more cases are coming to the surface, much to the an­guish of the traditionalists. According to the report published on July 8, India is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), all of which require governments to take comprehensive actions towards ending FGM as part of their obligations under these Conventions. Subhashini Ali, leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, who released this report, told Open, “I had intervened in FGM cases in Kerala as early as 2017, including in taking action against a clinic that facilitated FGM. The dilemma that survivors often face is that if they want to take legal action, they will have to take it against members of their own family and the barber who did it. A big problem is nobody knows the extent of prevalence of this practice.” It adds that the failure to collect robust data, to pass a law or policy against FGM, and to put in place multi-sectoral interventions to end the practice of FGM is a violation of India’s international obligations. “The above study presents find­ings from a sociocultural standpoint on FGM - learning from the community perspective on the issue, examining the experiences of women and girls living within some communities in Kerala, and understanding the possible driving factors (in addition to gender inequality) responsible for the prevalence of FGM/C in Kerala. The personal experiences shared by nine brave women who chose to speak up against the practice show how FGM/C affects the bodily integrity and bodily au­tonomy of women and girls while violat­ing their constitutional rights to equality, nondiscrimination, and privacy,” it avers.

A new UN report has shed further light on the consequences of FGM. “Immediate sexual and reproductive health issues in­clude severe bleeding, infections, problems urinating, and debilitating pain. Later in life, girls who have been subject to female genital mutilation face longer-term health risks, such as chronic pain, cysts, abnormal scarring, menstrual problems, sexual problems such as pain during intercourse and decreased satisfaction, infertility, complications in childbirth, postpartum hemorrhages, stillbirth, and increased risk of newborn deaths. In some cases, these complications are fatal to the woman. The psychological impacts of female genital mutila­tion include girls losing trust in their caregivers, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and low self-esteem. The physical and psychological consequences of FGM can also become barriers for girls and women to learn, work, and socialise.”

FGM is now banned in more than 70 countries. Anti-FGM activists here hope that India, too, will soon fall on that list.