On January 31, 2004, all the accused in four criminal cases of glorification of sati were acquitted. They included a former minister, a former IAS officer, an advocate and the president of the Rajput Maha Sabha (http://www.countercurrents.org/gen-shukla190304.htm ).
In August 2002, Kuttu Bai, 65, burned to death on her husband's funeral pyre in a village in central India Fifteen people were arrested over the incident, which took place in Madhya Pradesh state. They faced charges of murder and conspiracy and included the woman's two grown-up sons, who apparently did nothing to stop her.
ceremony say they were forced back by the angry crowd. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2180380.stm)
Twenty-five sati incidents occurred in the Bundelkand region of Uttar Pradesh in as many years. One of the cases was that of 18-year-old Javitri Devi of Jaari, a small village in Banda district. A temple to her memory was built in 1979 from the money collected in the impoverished village which, according to India Today (November 29, pages 43 - 45), "did not even have a dispensary". The temple's priest claimed that on the average around fifteen people came to pay respects, but during Navrati thousands poured in. "Several such sati mandirs and chabutaras dot the region's landscape...." After Rajasthan, it would appear that Bundelkand has the highest number of sati incidents, with three districts alone accounting for more than a dozen.
"All this is a part of our tradition and customs," observed Anil Upadhaya, former principal of a degree college and local historian. He defended sati, and berated the government for interfering in "voluntary sati". The educated appear to find nothing repugnant in the act. The people of the area are proud to have had so many satimatas.
Politicians cash in on the practice's popularity. With an eye on the Dalit vote, a local politician demanded that people be allowed to worship the place where Charanshah died and asked the police to "stop interfering in religious faith of the people".
On November 11, 1999, Charanshah, 50, "circumambulated the lit pyre four times, folded her hands and then climbed on to it without screaming or shouting. Before we could rush to rescue her, she was burnt to ashes," said her son, Shishupal. The village turned into a scene of riotous merriment.
In August 2006, a widow, Janakrani, burnt to death on the funeral pyre of her husband Prem Narayan in Sagar district in Tuslipar village in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Senior Madhya Pradesh police official Shahid Absar told the BBC that early investigations had revealed that she had not been coerced into performing the act (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5273336.stm).
A Different Kind Of Parental Love
In Taiwan, Lin Wen-piao mixed pesticide with yoghurt and milk, and fed the concotion to his two children before taking it himself; he had been diagnosed with cancer three days earlier. Though appalled, the Taiwanese sympathized with the 52-year-old unemployed construction worker in the southern city of Kaohsiung. This was in 2003.
"Yet some health experts viewed the deaths as part of a trend. While Taiwan is seeing a rise in family suicide-homicides, such tragedies stopped being oddities long ago in other parts of Asia, notably Japan," notes Associated Press reporter Annie Huang (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/08/world/main587450.shtml).
Between 1993 and 2003, 78 family suicides were reported in Taiwan. Mental illness plays a role, but more important are long-held East Asian beliefs about parental roles and duties.
In September 2001, a wealthy couple in the central county of Changhua had a large incinerator installed in their villa. They removed their slippers, arranging them neatly outside the incinerator door; they left a note complaining about Taiwan's political instability and expressing a wish to "leave this ugly world behind". Police found ashes and bone fragments from the couple's three children, ages 19 to 24, next to the incinerator. The badly burned bodies of the parents were found inside the furnace.
"Many of our parents consider children their own property or subordinates," says Wang Yu-min, an executive at Taiwan's Children Welfare Association. "They will live and die together with the children. It is a different way of showing parental love than in the West."
Mafumi Usui, professor of psychology at Niigata Seiryo University in Japan, notes that Japan has a long history of family suicides, and they are too frequent to make major headlines. So frequent, indeed, that Japan has phrases for them: "Ikka shinju" is when an entire family commits suicide; when a parent kills the children before killing himself, it's called "muri shinju."
Despite democracy appearing in many Asian countries, family suicides are persistent remnants of age-old traditions that required absolute obedience to parents or superiors.
