In a heart-wrenching incident at Presidency University, Bangalore, a 19-year-old girl was stabbed to death by her relative to whom she denied his love proposal. After stabbing the girl, the boy also committed suicide. From some sources, it has been found that the boy was related to the girl’s paternal family. Even the girl informed her mother about the boy’s proposal and also informed her about her response to the boy’s proposal. Both mother and daughter have never thought of such incidents will happen in their life. The boy was a student of another institution and he reached Presidency University with a motive to kill the girl as she reportedly rejected his proposal for a romantic relationship. These incidents again lead to the same question in whether rejection from a girl means a death invitation or rape for them? The Azamgarh murder case, Jharkhand’s Dumka murder case, and now the Presidency Case—in all these cases— the common point was rejection by the girl to the boy for either marriage or love proposal. There are many such cases where the girl has become a victim of different types of crime. One such case has been highlighted in the Chappak movie which is based on the real-life incident of the acid attack victim Laxmi Agarwal. All these cases show where our next generation is heading. Is it because they are intolerant towards the rejection made by a girl or it’s the fault of the family, neighbours, and our schools who fail to teach the next generation about the values of human life, respect towards a girl, and society as a whole? Last year, in a similar incident which was occurred in Egypt where a girl was murdered in front of Mansoura University in Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt by a man because she rejected his marriage proposal. These cases are an example to show that these problems are not related to ladies of India only. It’s a problem of entire women hood from all over the world. This problem cannot be solved by giving punishment to the culprit. It’s important to understand the importance and values of human life. For giving birth to a child, a woman has to wait for 9 months and 10 days. But for taking the life of the person it hardly took a minute. Technologically, we have become advanced but our vision toward human life, our ethics, and our culture has been narrowed over time. It is all because we have created this difference among ourselves. First of all, we have to stop the discrimination between males and females in our family. It’s should be compulsory for every school to develop a curriculum till class 10th in such a way that students should understand the importance of life. They should be intolerant of injustice towards human beings but not of other issues. They should be taught about wrongful acts towards society from the beginning. According to U.N. chief Antonio Guterres, violence against women and girls is the most pervasive “human rights violation” in the world. Every 11 minutes, a woman or a girl is killed by an intimate partner or a family member. There is a need for transformative action toward these serious issues. Transformative action is possible only if we will be able to transform ourselves first and then society as a whole. We have to inculcate our moral ethics, and culture first in our children. If check our ancient history then we will find that our ancient society has never told us to discriminate between a girl and a male. In Indian tradition, if we check our mythology stories Ramayana and Mahabharat then we will find that girl was given the freedom of choosing a husband. Though with the period society has transformed in positive as well as negative ways. To tackle all those negativities, we had formed different types of laws for the protection of human life. A man, who gets rejected by a girl takes rejection as a licence to them to avenge or to kill them. This shows our failure to protect the girl from such a culprit. Maybe it was possible to save the life of the girl at the Presidency University, Bangalore. If the mother has talked about this matter to the boy directly in the presence of his family members in a polite manner. Maybe by proper counseling, his mindset would have changed. The act which the boy has done with the girl was planned and that might have been prevented by the timely intervention of the family members correctly by providing him with proper counseling. They might be these incidents would not have happened there. The life of the girl would have been saved along with the boy who is fighting for his life now at the hospital. Now it’s high time to discuss and think about the Holistic Education system. Through this, we can transform our child’s future in the right direction. Holistic education is an approach towards the education system which will not only help the students to grow intellectually but will help them grow spiritually, and bodily. It will help students to develop positive social behavior which we all want nowadays for the betterment of society. The education system needs to be reformed then only our future generation will be secure and safe. They must understand the values of human life, morality, and ethics from the beginning of their childhood.
Dr Pyali Chatterjee is HOD, Faculty of Law, ICFAI University, Raipur Chhattisgarh.