Suicide Is Death Invited As an Escape
By G.N.
Devy
05.03.21
A member of
parliament, Mohan Delkar, was not a widely-known politician. However, in Dadra
and Nagar Haveli, the tiny Union territory, and in the tribal districts in
south Gujarat, he was seen as quite a phenomenon. He was elected as MP several
times and held sway over most assembly constituencies in the southern tribal Talukas
of Gujarat. Over a week ago, he was found dead in a hotel in Mumbai. A suicide
note left behind by him points to victimization and harassment by official
agencies as the cause for his decision.
The note is
not as elaborate as the 60-page-long note left behind by Kalikho Pul, a
one-time chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, who ended his life in August
2016. He had placed on record, under the title, “Mere Vichar” — “My Thoughts” —
an elaborate account of his rise in politics and the rot he saw around him. It
gave details of how even Supreme Court judges carried a price tag and how
judgments could be influenced. The indictment of the system by individuals who
can no more be summoned to give further testimony as witness has an obvious
limitation as fact-sheets. However, they need to be read not as fact-sheets but
as pointers to harsh truths.
In the same
year, 2016, another suicide note was left behind by a young student in
Hyderabad. It said that he had wanted to be a writer, but there was a big gap
between his mind and his body. His body, Rohith Vemula felt, was a fatal
accident. This student wrote, “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate
identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was
a man treated as a mind.” Vemula’s note lays bare the social malaise arising
out of caste identity. So does the suicide note of Payal Tadvi, a tribal woman
who trained as a gynaecologist and worked at the Nair Hospital in Mumbai. She
realized that her social identity as an Adivasi was coming in her way as a
medical professional. Like a caged animal, she decided to end her life barely a
year after she started her medical practice. The notes by Kalikho Pul and Mohan
Delkar express their utter dismay with politics in India.
Do these
tragic shockers have a message for us as a country? Nearly six decades ago, the
historian, Upendra Thakur, published a study under the title, The History of
Suicide in India (1963). He observed that the incidence of suicide in India is
normally much higher than the cases reported in official data. The National
Crime Records Bureau keeps the record. It reported 1, 35,445 deaths by suicide
in 2012. The NCRB, read in the light of Thakur’s well-researched observation,
indicates that suicide cases have an alarming scale.
A USC expert offers insight on coping mechanisms during National Suicide
Prevention Week. (Illustration/iStock)
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The World
Health Organization, too, maintains suicide statistics. The latest WHO data
rank India at the 16th top place on “suicide profusion scale” among the 194
countries covered by it. The global average is 10.6 points (suicides per
hundred thousand persons). Suicide incidence in India is 16, which is one and
half times of the global average. Quite alarming, although the alarm tends to
get neglected by conflating farmers’ indebtedness leading to their
self-annihilation with the desire to reject the world which is an even more
serious sign of our times. It has been quite some time since India left its
farmers to die a slow death. The present regime’s complete indifference to them
is its climax. However, suicidal tendency and the incidence of suicide prevail
in other sections of society as well. Guru Dutt, Silk Smitha, Nafisa Joseph,
Kuljeet Randhawa, Kunal Singh, Jiah Khan and Sushant Singh Rajput were
celebrities, not nameless farmers.
The truth
is that suicidal tendency in the Indian population cannot be understood if it
is merely seen as cold numbers. If numbers alone are the truth, the deaths by
Covid-19, as I write this piece, come close to 1.6 lakh, while deaths by
suicide for the same period, projected from the NCRB’s available three-year-old
data, may be almost similar in terms of numbers. The pandemic surely deserves
so much national attention; suicide, too, should deserve it.
The
question involved here is not as much about death as about the medical or
anatomical aspect. It is also not about the criminal aspect associated with
suicide since committing or abetting suicide is in the list of crimes. The
question that this alarmingly large number of suicides makes one ask is if
there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with India driving some of us to reject
the order of things.
I was
recently going through the Dictionary of Martyrs (1857-1947) prepared by the
Indian Council of Historical Research. Its volume for the old Bombay state
lists nearly 1,500 names of individuals who died, in most cases knowing that
they would die, in the name of freedom for India. These include persons from
all castes, communities and cultural backgrounds. Many of them were the second
or third generation ancestors of the farmers who committed suicide in recent
time. The martyrs’ acceptance of death, painful and tragic for them and for
their families, had no shade of rejection of the human order. It was, if one
may imagine on their behalf, an affirmation of hope for a glorious tomorrow.
The
suicides of India’s farmers, artists, social activists, medical professionals,
IIT students, housewives and politicians are an indication that the rot is not
just in the economic inequality, in its caste discrimination, in its oppression
of women and in its hopelessly bankrupt knowledge systems. It is much deeper
than that.
It was
India that produced thousands of young men and women who willingly sacrificed
their lives during the freedom struggle. Suicide is not merely death. It is
death invited as an escape.
Guru Dutt’s
outcry in his classic of despair, Pyaasa — “Jala Do, Jala Do, Jala Do Yeh
Duniya” — accurately captures that sentiment. Suicide, apart from all the
other things it means, is a declaration of the degeneration of things. The
rampant incidence of suicide is a telling comment on how we have abetted the
degeneration of every system, every source of hope, from the Constitution to
the courts, from school to Sachivalaya, from ideal to idiom. We may be a
GDP-fat country, but are we doing well on the Happiness Index? No, clearly not.
We need to envision India, once again, perhaps.
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G.N.
Devy is a literary scholar and cultural activist.
Original
Headline: Death by wish
Source: The Telegraph India
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