Any news item that comes as an ethical shocker is a torment, especially when the content is hard to believe or bizarre. When an average newspaper reader bumps on some unexpected crime news that is scandalously gruesome, he disregards it after a while, which is until he is rudely shaken awake with a newer blow from the crime reporting genre.
Take a recent crime reporting by the media. Murder by the burning alive of two little kids by their recently wedded uncle and aunt in Chhattisgarh’s Ghughsidih village, which it had served to us with the purported reason: lack of privacy for the victims’ newly married uncle and aunt. Allow me to reconstruct the media story. Renuka, the kids’ mother had reportedly left her children with her mother-in-law for work. She returned to find the charred bodies of the children. Malti, the kids’ aunt, claimed to have burnt them alive because the kids were too intrusive to her coveted privacy between her and her husband, who were married only on February this year.
Now simple villagers turning into murderers for the sake of a little privacy sounds incredible and it is none of a crime reporter’s business to examine it from the sociological perspective. What a reporter gets from the police file or maybe from the neighbourhood gossips, he serves it at rocket speed without discretion. Here in this particular case, the murders were most heinous, because two blameless, doting, nagging kids had been burnt alive by their newly wedded uncle and aunt. land issue, witchcraft or something more sinister might possibly be the reason; only further investigation could have revealed it.
lack of privacy leading to the gruesome murders of children in rural area is a case befitting urgent social study. We think that life in one bedroom flats in the metros cramping huge joint family was an issue. Such victims of space there zealously believe that the low density of population and the deserted fields in the villages are gainful opportunity for anyone who needs a rendezvous. It may possibly be true, or probably utterly false—well one would actually like to hide behind the hedge of one’s serious mistrust, solely for some composure. The Hamletian belief—read a naïve newspaper reader’s reasonable doubt here in the traits of man, in the ingenuousness of his tight spot that drives him to contemplate on a crime of passion, stands time-honored.
Murders have been committed for jealousy, greed, revenge, lust, in a fit of rage that still lie unsolved. The most planned murders those were solved in a jiffy, which the neighbours rightly guessed by instinct and inklings even before the police had arrived on the scene—all sorts of conjectures and rationalizations notwithstanding, one thing is undeniably preset, which is that a murder is always perpetrated by humans on a fellow human. The reasons vary.
Modus-operandi varies. Schemes or the needlessness of that for the killers—innocents, simpletons or the heinous amongst them, vary.
The worry is the newness, the reproach in them. The revelation is for them who refused to get amused with what was shocking in the media.
Could not the children be shooed away if some privacy was needed, one wondered at the murderers of kids in the family who are cooling their heels in jail now. Before one went digging one’s brains further into this newfangled narrative on murder motive, one wished that the media did not forget to keep track of the final police investigation and also trail on the court trials till the verdict came. Best would have been if it had shown some restraint in favour of a protracted tracking of the investigation to avoid sensationalism.
(The writer is District Information & Public Relations Officer, Gajapati. email id gurbirwrites@gmail.com)