Jul 11, 2024 09:07 PM IST
Their deaths call for more than just conviction and sentencing: Closure will be achieved only by seeking preventive and corrective action
She was nine. Her mother had gone out, leaving her alone in their Gurugram home. A 16-year-old boy, known to the family as a tuition provider, had access to the house. Sequences pieced together by police and reported in media say that seeing him rifling through her mother’s little trove of valuables, the girl raised an alarm. But, before anyone else could hear her shouts, the boy strangled her to death.
This column is not about going into the crime, so I will not go into the details of the unspeakably macabre acts that followed. Besides, the matter now being within the purview of the juvenile justice system, it would not be right to attempt that. Except to note three things:
One, the boy has said he watched crime movies and that this is where he got his ideas and motivation. Also, he was into betting and stole and borrowed money frequently for that addiction. Two, what the victim’s mother must be going through defies contemplation. Three, the murderer’s father said that he does not want to see his son, now in police custody. And will not hire a lawyer to defend him. In other words, the father, disgusted by his son’s action, has left it to the law to deal with his son in the manner that it should.
The gruesome act being what it was, and while justice’s wheels turn as they will, we from the civil society need to reflect on the following. One hopes the boy, if and as and when his guilt is established, gets the maximum penalty that exists for such a crime committed by one of his age. But there is something else that is vital. He should be examined very intensively by psychiatric experts not just for a better understanding of the case but for society’s benefit. Simultaneously, customised counselling has to reach the victim’s mother and other members of the traumatised family. They cannot be left to “the healing action of time”. The girl’s mother, in particular, needs to be helped by experts in the field to come to terms — if that is at all possible — with her shattering experience.
Beyond that, this tragedy must not end just with a conviction and sentencing. It must lead to defining preventive and correctional action. The victim saw a theft being attempted and called out, in a sense, to the laws, to law enforcers, to crime prevention, when she was smothered. She was a victim and a whistle-blower. She must be heard in her death. She is telling us that if exposure to crime stories through the cinema or any other medium, and to betting, can lead to so appalling, so outrageous, and so altogether hideous a crime, steps need to be taken to put curbs on such exposure. Schools, educators and families must know that what is at stake is the future of innocence.
Not two days had passed since the Gurugram horror that the Hathras tragedy happened. All of us know what Hathras now stands for — a killer stampede. Again, I will not say anything about the crime behind the stampede for the law is seized of it. But I cannot put away from my mind the fate of another girl. She was 10, one among the over a hundred victims. At her obsequies, her father’s words were no different from King Lear’s at the death of Cordelia in Shakespeare’s great play — “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all…?” The Hathras father howled, re-living in his mind the agonies suffered by his daughter as the weight of hundreds fell on her delicate frame.
Those guilty of negligence and worse will without doubt be found and prosecuted. But here too there is a larger question behind the quotidian one of fixing blame for the stampede: How and why, in heaven’s name, should cults around so-called godmen be allowed to enjoy autonomy, immunity and even anarchic sovereignty? Can such so-called religious centres and their programmes be considered exempt from the laws of public accountability? Satsangs are meant to provide spiritual succour. They cannot be allowed to become theatres of death.
A major review of such religious or semi-religious institutions nationally and across all religious divides is called for. Public order is a state subject under the Constitution, as is the subject under the State List’s entry 28, “Markets and Fairs”, which (in the “Fairs” part) comes closest to congregations of the kind that has scarred Hathras. So, the government of Uttar Pradesh is the appropriate agency for the reparation for the stampede. But, what is needed is nationwide scanning of such organisations. Here, the entry coincidentally bearing the same number, 28, in the Concurrent List — “Charities and charitable institutions, charitable and religious endowments and religious institutions” — becomes relevant. It must be invoked now by the Centre in coordination with the states, to initiate a check of so-called ashrams and their counterparts in religions other than Hinduism, so as to bring them under a measure of supervision, accountability and compliance with the norms of public order and safety.
Article 19 (1) (b) of the Constitution confers on all citizens of India the right to assemble peacefully and without arms. But it stipulates the placing of reasonable restrictions on that right “in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India and public order”. Congregations of the devout have been part of India’s ethos and culture through the ages. The institutions inspired by Swami Vivekananda, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Swami Sivananda, Sri Aurobindo, Ma Anandamayi, and Swami Chinmayananda to name a few, are highly respected bodies. But now, the surface density of the fraudulent and the dangerously exploitative kind, aided by the tools of technology to magnify and intensify their impact, has spiralled. They are now far too big in volume to be allowed the “right to assemble” without check.
Interestingly, in his very first edict — Edict I, where he places restrictions on the killing of animals in the name of religion (sacrifices) — Emperor Asoka says, “…nor shall samaja (festive gatherings) be held because King Devanampriya Priyadarsi sees many evils in such gatherings”. Bahuka hi dosa samajasa is the original expression in Magadhi Prakrit. This edict may not have been enforced well in the great Maurya’s realm, but it is there, spelt out as a clear intention, for us to see and derive some instruction from.
Hathras could turn the stampede tragedy into a redemptive self-cleansing of India’s great faith traditions if such a national survey is undertaken, with steps to regulate and reform placed on track.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former administrator, is a student of modern Indianhistory. The views expressed are personal
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