The murderer next door

The murderer next door

The death sentence awarded by a fast-track court to Govind Singhal, 23-year old youth of Bharalumukh, a locality in Guwahati, after being held guilty in the gruesome murder of Sweta Agarwal, has been largely welcomed by all sections of people. It was one of the most gruesome murders Assam has witnessed in the recent years, one that had created quite a sensation, especially because the hapless victim Sweta Agarwal was a brilliant student who was pursuing her B Com in a reputed college in the city after having secured the first position in the Commerce stream of the Higher Secondary examination conducted by the Assam Higher Secondary Council in 2015. The court has surmised that Govind, the cold-blooded murderer, had killed Sweta by burning her alive after having thrashed her with both harp and blunt weapons, with the post-mortem examination report showing as many as 13 injury marks on her body. What is most appalling is that the two accomplices who had helped Govind in the horrible crime were both women – one was his 50-year-old mother Kamala Devi Singhal, and the other his 25-year-old elder sister Bhavani. While it is a matter for psychologists to analyse why a young man, who allegedly was in love with the victim, resorted to such a step, it is indeed highly intriguing that two women – one of them a mother – had also joined hands with the culprit in putting the young girl to death, and that too inside their own house. The court, while pronouncing the quantum of punishment on Saturday, has rightly termed it as a “premeditated cold-blooded murder.” This clearly means that Govind, the convict, had not only decided to kill Sweta much before the actual day in which he executed his decision, but had also made clear plans, and that too in connivance with none other than his mother and elder sister, on how to lure Sweta to their house and then do away with her life. On that fateful day – December , 2017 – Govind had taken Sweta to their rented house on his motorbike with the clear intention of carrying out the pre-determined murder. Had it not been so, and more particularly, had he not drawn up the plan with his mother and sister about killing her by taking her to their house, the two women at least would have probably stopped him from taking her life. While no psychologist has carried out any analysis of the psychology behind the murder of Sweta Agarwal, a report, available on the Internet, quoting David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas-Austin says, most people, after all, have a thought about committing a murder. The study, in which he had surveyed 5,000 people, led to the publication of a book called “The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind is Designed to Kill” published in 2005 – which found that 91 per cent of men and 84 per cent of women had thought about killing someone, often with very specific hypothetical victims and methods in mind. People often utter inside their mouths about killing a person – whether while exploding with rage in traffic jams or responding to flippant insults with physical aggression. In reality, however, such people do not commit any murder, but only air their anguish by way of murmuring a curse. Scientists, on the other hand, have termed murder of wife or female lover by a man as “uxoricide” – originating in Latin uxor meaning “wife” and -cide, from caedere meaning “to cut, to kill”. Those studying the psycho-dynamic theories or murders have offered explanations for the mechanisms underlying the occurrence of uxoricides. It has been thus suggested that males who kill their female partners experience both an unconscious dependence on their wife or lover, and at the same time also a resentment of her. Thus, as such men wish to give up or sever the relationship, they unknowingly perceive themselves as too helpless to do so, or find the woman stronger in arguments, culminating into a belief that killing the woman is the only way to be free of her. Though the Sweta Agarwal murder may not exactly conform to explanations given by Western psychologists, one must condemn the murder with the strongest words, hail the fast-track court’s judgment of awarding death sentence to the culprit, and then also examine from the socio-cultural viewpoint, why the number of such incidents has been on the rise in recent years.

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