Crime related to passion rises in Assam
Bhupen Roy breaks down on hearing of his wife's killing.
Aman walks down Guwahati streets brandishing the severed head of his wife. It was retribution, he says, for being cheated in marriage. Another man strangulates his wife on a similar suspicion. A security officer guns down the wife of an MLA and then shoots himself. Were they lovers? Fun turns to tragedy as a young man kills his business partner while fighting over call girls at a resort.
There has been a disturbing rise in crimes of passion in Assam. At least 15 people have lost their lives in the name of love in three months. Violence in public had lurked below the surface in the state for the last two decades ever since insurgency and army operations became a way of life. But now, private passions are beginning to show their dark, sinister side.
On October 7, autorickshaw driver Ranjit Das, 46, shook the state to its core after hacking his wife with a machete and walking down the streets of Dispur with her severed head. Das, who hails from Tihu, a small town in Nalbari district, suspected that his wife, a nurse, was having an affair with a colleague. On the same day, Bazrul Haq, 35, strangulated his wife Samina Begum in Dhubri, western Assam. He suspected her of having affairs with several men on the sly.
On October 10, Sanatan Das, 27, personal security officer of Asom Gana Parishad MLA Bhupen Roy, shot dead Roy's wife, Anjali, 35, and then committed suicide. Sanatan and Anjali were allegedly having an affair. A sexual orgy turned violent on September 16. Twenty-six-year-old businessman Sonal Banerjee was allegedly killed by his partner and surrendered ulfa member Kukil Gogoi at a resort in Sonapur, near Guwahati. They were reportedly fighting over the attention of five call girls they had brought into the resort.
"Assamese society has always been a liberal society, with little social pressure or interference in personal life," says Indrani Dutta, director, Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development, Guwahati. But in an era of cell phones and Internet, individual rights and freedom are being redefined. "And reactions are often sudden and violent." Add to it the rise of human rights groups in the wake of army operations. "It's a welcome development. But the line between aggression and assertion is very thin," she adds. People cross social and legal barriers whenever their sense of being wronged attains critical mass.
The middle class in Assam is at a crossroads, feels Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, IGP, Assam Police. He blames exposure to globalised lifestyles on 24x7 television and the hankering to ape the West for it.
An extra-marital affair doesn't always have a macabre end. Bashanti Bordoloi (name changed), 45, an excise superintendent in Tinsukia and a mother of two college-going students, lodged a complaint at the Assam Police Headquarters against an SP who she allegedly had an affair with. She didn't want any punishment for the SP. "Just force him to continue the relationship with me," she requested the investigating officer.
Ranjit Das after he killed his wife
Relationship issues are often sensationalised on local TV channels. In September this year, a TV channel broadcast the story of a woman assaulted by her late husband's acquaintances. It was later found that she was not mentally stable. On August 17, residents of Jyotinagar in Morigaon barged into a rented house where an unmarried couple was found in a compromising situation. Despite police presence, mediapersons filmed the naked woman while local women waited outside to chop off her hair.
A similar scene was repeated a fortnight later in Nagaon where a government employee was caught while having sex in his rented house. Locals entered the house and assaulted the man before handing him over to the police for "polluting" the environment. "To keep the public happy, we detain the 'accused' in such cases," says Jeetmal Doley, Morigaon superintendent of police.
But will that stop the state from slipping through the grey zone of dangerous passions?
