He was not the first one to fall in love and unfortunately not the only one to have perished because of it. While some see a religious angle to Delhi youngster Ankit Saxena’s murder, many others perceive the incident as a case of ‘honour’ killing.
Whose honour was sought to be protected? Can something as dishonourable as a murder ever add to anyone’s honour? Shouldn’t we stop using expressions like ‘honour’ killing in such cases?
It is irrelevant that Ankit was a Hindu and his lady love was from a different religion. Giving the issue a religious colour (a seeming reversal in this case of the widely circulated oxymoron Love Jihad), we are basically trying to shield the perpetrators. Recent incidents of mob lynching and killings in the name of cow protection too fall in this category of ghastly murder, and nothing else.
Supreme Dishonour a Mechanism to Control the Female Body?
Why do incidents like killing close kin or their love interests occur? Some rationalists have an altogether different take on such incidents. They argue that there is an infinite – and reprehensible – patriarchal urge to control female body.
Punishing so-called deviants, Ankit because of his association with a girl from a different community in this case, in a way reinforces the control. The control keeps the purity of blood intact and lineage clean. The control allows a section of society to take extreme measures to teach offenders – present and potential – a lesson.
A boy falling in love with a girl is a tale as old as human civilisation itself. So is the patriarchal urge to control female body, at least in most phases of the journey to civilisation.
But why do we see sudden spurt of such cases once in a while, even among societies with flexible family ties and hence considerably less propensity to enforce control?
Delhi certainly is not a badland and Ankit is not from a remote corner of the country, devoid of all modern values. The fact that something like this happened in Delhi of all places needs to be seen with a new perspective.
Anomic Society Cannot Make Narcissists Give Up Their Raw Emotions
A combination of two concepts – eminent psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s Infantile Narcissism and French Sociologist Emile Durkheim’s Anomie – offers some answers.
I have taken the liberty to stretch the meaning of the two concepts just to make them relevant to our times. Freud’s ‘infantile narcissist’ is someone who is obsessed with himself. He will go to any extent to fulfil his desires. As a result, he becomes a control freak, bends all rules to satisfy all his baser instincts and is full of raw desires. The only way to ensure that he remains in check is with the pulls and pressures of a vibrant society and a functional state. Even the die-hard narcissist is made to renounce raw desires in the midst of a functional democracy.
Durkheim’s ‘anomie’ is a society in transition. Or to put it more bluntly, a society where accepted norms have lost their legitimacy. Do these concepts tell us something about the growing incidence of dishonour killings and mob lynching now? They certainly do.
Ankit Was a Victim of Growing Lawlessness
By various acts of commissions and omissions, we have created a situation where accepted norms have been made to look silly.
Society has either lost control or is looking less legitimate by certain sections because of its partisan approach. The Padmavaat controversy was one of many recent instances of anomie taking root. And no wonder – when sheer hooliganism is allowed to grow in the name of protecting a particular belief system, or when mob lynching is glorified in the name of perpetrators’ religious affiliations, or when cold-blooded murder justified in the name of protecting family’s so-called honour – society loses its legitimacy to make a narcissist renounce his desires.
The only way to ensure that no other Ankit is made to meet the same tragic fate, is for us all to work towards the goal of retrieving our society from the anomic state it has fallen into.
Can we do this as real deshbhakts? That would be a real tribute to Ankit and all those who dare to love and spread pyar ka paigaam.
(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own.)
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