Home ›› 13 Mar 2023 ›› Opinion
When a politically influential person or a film star or a business tycoon or persons of their similar stature die in accidents or they are killed or they meet an accident there is always a huge hullabaloo, public clamor and what not. Public clamor grows stronger with every day passing but barely we see such clamor or protest when a domestic help is tortured to death.
We rarely see any flurry of protests being staged or human chains being formed. Why is it such? This question also comes across the minds of a section conscientious people. The answer is obvious in the social status of victims. This is all about class i.e. which class those victims belong to. Those who come to the city to do household chores for their masters they are from the lowest stratum of the society. The appropriate definition for them is they are the lowest of the low in the society. Those who employ them are called employers.
When employers are called masters or mistresses the notion is associated with feudal and slave societies where, especially in slave society the bodies of the slaves too belonged to the masters or mistresses. This was the reason as to why they were entitled to doing anything they like to do with their bodies – beating, lashing, caning and whipping. Even if they died of such torment and torture they could do nothing against this brutal and cruel system. That was the way of the world.
These masters or mistresses, though not all, have now changed only their titles. Under the disguise of being the master of a domestic helps they very often become predators. They whatever they can to make them work hard all through the day and night when those boys and girls, in most cases they are girls of tender ages, fail to deliver as they expect them to do. They even resort to the path of torture. There have been many such instances where they even singe their private parts with kitchen tools.
In one such instance, a domestic help was pushed off the roof top to die to prove that she had committed suicide. Such news items never make headline in the newspapers. We journalists write about their stories to treat them just as stories like other everyday news items. We publish them only to forget them. On many occasions, there were no protest at all and on others there were some protests staged by some small organizations or some human rights organizations.
We don’t stage protests because such news items never earn a reputation or if there is any it is very little in terms of its significance because they are little importance in the society. Major political parties don’t come forward to help the victims’ families because it will not inflate their vote tally. Most of them are busy pleasing people pleasantly to woo their votes.
A news on the murder of a 10-year-domestic help appeared in all major newspapers on March 1. It shook the common conscience of the people in the country. The way the girl was murdered it unfolded the cruelty and brutality of the nature of the employer of the girl. The girl was not only murdered she was kept hidden inside the house for a day. Only when the body began to decompose the employer tried to get rid of it by putting the body on a freezing van.
What is more shocking is the victim’s elder sister also works at the same house. She was threatened with dire consequence if she divulged the true story of the murder. The father of the victim too came to know about the torture on her daughter a few days earlier before the murder from her daughter. He too didn’t dare to report it to police fearing reprisal.
Such is the situation in the society where we have cultivated the culture of fear that very often prevent people, especially the poor section of people, from lodging a general diary or reporting it to police to take preemptive measures. There is also hesitation from the part of the would-be victims that police might not come forward to their help as they belong to the poor family background.
This notion of poor and downtrodden people are also encouraging the predators to go on with whatever they like to do being in an advantageous position in a society like ours. In this particular case, victim didn’t keep mum though she was only 10 years old. Even though she didn’t go to police station and it was not what we expect from a girl of her age, to report on her torturer master or mistress she at least opened her mouth to her father. Little did she know that her father could do very little or nothing at all.
Before the death of the girl reported on March 1, many more such incidents of murders had been reported but we can guess how many of them had seen the light of the day. In most cases, the perpetrators have finally been able to come out of the prison, if arrested at all, with the news fading away and with the public clamor dying down. Such incidents continue to go on unabated as the victims can’t afford to run the cases. In many cases, the victims become silent for fear of their lives following continuous threats from the perpetrators.
As the families of the victims have no one by their sides they finally go silent and due to lack of evidence the cases are disposed of. Until and unless there are strict laws and punishment meted out to the perpetrators such heart-rending incidents will continue to recur hurting the hearts of millions of people who seek justice and who want punishable acts to be enacted to stop recurrence of such incidents in the country.
The occurrence of such barbarism and violent acts can’t be stopped by only some protests staged by some organizations. Yes, it needs to raise the level of consciousness of people and awareness campaigning but it also needs the help of the government to come forward to punish the murderers to create examples so that killers think at least twice before they are involved in this type of cruel act.
At the same time, the country requires the execution of whatever laws we have in place. If needed, new laws can be enacted to punish the criminals. We need a strict and strong law to punish the torturers and tormentors of those helpless and hapless poor girls.
The writer is a journalist. He can be contacted at maksud.i.rahaman@gmail.com
