: On May 27, a 50-year-old woman —Sk. Bashirun — committed suicide by jumping from her two-storey house at Vinukonda. What forced this elderly woman, mother of two sons and grandmother of four children, to kill herself?
After the death of her husband who built the house, Bashirun was living along with her two sons. But soon she got vexed after her sons began to squabble. Upset over the ill- treatment meted out to her, the woman took the extreme step.
The Vinukonda police arrested her two sons and daughter-in-laws and registered cases under Section 306 IPC.
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In a similar incident, Satyasri (60) was killed by her son Sandeep and daughter-in-law Lavanya, after the latter felt that the elderly woman was coming in their way to dispose of an ancestral property to clear their dues. Both these incidents took place within a week raising disturbing questions about changing family values.
“The family tried to make it look like suicide by hanging the body from a ceiling fan, but during investigation we found out that the woman was strangled to death.
Her husband had gone a morning walk when all this happened,” said Station House Officer, Vinukonda, Srinivasa Rao.
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The recent trend is only the tip of the iceberg pointing to a rapidly deteriorating family values, warn psychologists.
“With family relationships increasingly centred on money and property-related issues, the institution of family, marriage is being redefined. All relationships are becoming individual-centric and in the days to come, the situation will get only get worse,” said noted psychiatrist and Superintendent of NRI General Hospital Dronamraju Phanibhushan.
A pointer to deterioration of
family values,
says psychiatrist