Accident or suicide, time for blame game

Both Tunisha Sharma and Anjali Singh – the two 20-year-olds who lost their lives – will hopefully point the nation’s conscience in the right direction. (Photo: Irina Anastasiu via Unsplash)

Is it a lack of personal accountability or a distrust in the system as a whole that has us pointing fingers at everyone but ourselves? A moral code goes beyond the prescribed, to what is practised. It is only when a public tragedy occurs that issues like responsibility, guilt, culpability come into the picture. As a nation we’d rather bury our head in the sand than go for a forensic examination of what went wrong. Ignoring the ‘why’ is a habit, leading to faulty diagnosis.

Understandably, any sudden rip in normalcy stuns those affected into incoherence; but the existence of underlying fissures that make these rips inevitable and organic need a more leisurely examination. Rather than pin it on an individual, the collective conscience makes everyone an equal participant. In this process, A or B no longer matters in a personal capacity; rather they are examples of us, making us interchangeable. If it can happen to him, it can happen to me. The sheer osmosis of co-existence dictates that we are prototypes of each other – related by species if not by blood. We are sharing a planet at this point in time, fellow travellers conjoined by terrain, walking under the same sky.

The road accident in Delhi on January 1 is more horrific to those who are able to recoil from it and maintain a mental distance in an ‘us and them’ way. As if the victim and the accused alighted on earth on that fateful day from outer space. Some are able to tread the superior path, and are the loudest in their condemnation. Anjali Singh who died sometime after midnight becomes more than a casualty; she is an errant daughter who stayed out too late, perhaps drank and partied with men, made her own way home at an unearthly hour. Her friend Nidhi, who ran back home and kept quiet for three days till the police came knocking at her door, is the personification of betrayal - and not of distrust in the state machinery. Through all raging pontifications, the abject surety of our own saintliness keeps us going.

The suicide of TV actress Tunisha Sharma unleashed an entire audience’s inner demons. We hurriedly brought to the incident our own insecurities and fears. Her mother said this, the family of her former boyfriend said that... When a young girl anywhere feels this is the end of the road, how does it absolve us of guilt as a society? Each of us must surely have played a role in getting her to that point, albeit unknowingly, with our preoccupation with success at any cost. Someone ends up paying the price of this general obsession.

Both Tunisha and Anjali – the two 20-year-olds who lost their lives – will hopefully point the nation’s conscience in the right direction. To be side-tracked by religion, gender, accusations and sob stories only affords us the luxury of distraction. All that dramatic rhetoric by vested interests manages to do is delay clarity, justice and a future course. No constructive action can follow a lack of empathy.