It is ironic that Viveka had to die to make the front page

I don’t know how big a story the suicide of former model, Viveka Babajee, is in south India.

But in the north – and especially in Bombay – it has received saturation coverage, featuring regularly on page one and becoming a lead story on TV news.

 

   I won’t trouble you with all the sad details of the poor girl’s suicide, but broadly, what happened was this. Babajee killed herself and suggested in notings found after her death that her boyfriend had driven her to it. The boyfriend in question says he went out with her for a couple of months but denies that he either caused or abetted the suicide. As far as I know, the police have found no evidence to suggest that the boyfriend pushed her to take her life. It is true that she may have been upset by the break-up of her relationship with him, but this is hardly the same thing as abetment to suicide.

 

   Some of you will remember a similar uproar which occurred when another former model, Nafisa Joseph, also committed suicide. Then too, the ex-boyfriend was picked up by the police and then too, the media treated the story as being of paramount importance. Eventually, the police had to concede that there was no evidence against the boyfriend and the case was dropped.

 

   Several questions emerge from these incidents. The first is the old debate about whether suicide itself should be a crime. In most Western democracies, suicide is legal. In India, we recognise that we cannot prosecute people who commit suicide – because they are dead – so the police focus their energies on failed suicides. What could be worse than the trauma of having been driven to suicide, having failed in the attempt, and then waking up to discover that you now face a jail sentence?

 

   When the police cannot find enough failed suicides, they tend to focus on the husbands of those who have committed suicide. Whenever a woman commits suicide, the first act of the local police force is to try and pin it on the husband and to see if he can be charged with abetment to suicide.

 

   In that sense, the picking up of the boyfriend of the dead models is part of a wider trend. We need to ask whether it makes any sense to treat suicide as a crime. Once suicide is legalised, then abetment to suicide should disappear as a crime too. If people harass somebody till he or she commits suicide, then there are plenty of sections in the penal code to take care of that.

 

   The second question relates to the blame game. When a member of your family dies, it is common to try and find someone to blame. In the case of suicide, the motivation to look for scapegoats is even greater. Few parents ever believe that their children are suicidal. When the children do, in fact, kill themselves, the parents believe that somebody else must have driven them to suicide. Their own kids would never commit such an act on their own.

 

   So, I am not surprised that the grieving parents of the dead models have lashed out at their boyfriends. This is an entirely understandable and totally human reaction. The only way they can make sense of their daughter’s suicide is by blaming it on somebody else.

 

   But should a grieving parent’s anger translate into a police case? Should the police threaten to prosecute individuals against whom there is no real evidence only because grief-stricken parents are lashing out after their daughters’ deaths?

 

   The third question relates to the media. When Viveka Babajee was alive, the media ignored her. She had her moment of fame in the 1990s and then quickly faded from public consciousness. By the turn of the century, the media had moved on, finding new models to photograph and to write about. If Viveka had lived, the chances are she would never have featured in the media again. No matter how much she craved it, the media would have denied her the oxygen of publicity.

 

"We know that stories that combine sex, glamour and death find a ready market. And so, tossing aside all our normal standards of newsworthiness, we plunge headlong into the cesspool of tabloid sensation."

   It is ironic, then, that she had to die to make the front page.

 

   The truth is that most people had either forgotten about Viveka Babajee or, in the case of a younger generation, had never heard of her. She became famous once again only because of the manner of her passing. Suddenly, we were all vultures picking at the carrion of her life, going over the details of her romances, and discussing whether she had hoped to marry her boyfriend. In death, she went from being a once famous model to becoming fodder for celebrity gossip.

 

   That we in the media should be so obsessed with her suicide tells us something about how the values of tabloid journalism and page three have taken over quality papers and page one. It is absurd that the details of her love life and the culpability of her boyfriend should be a lead headline on news broadcasts and it would be comical if it were not so tragic that respectable news channels should devote their air time to debates about whether the boyfriend was responsible.

 

   Is this what journalism has been reduced to?

 

   Do not be fooled by the claims of journalists that we are acting out of concern for Viveka or Nafisa and their families. Hundreds of women commit suicide every year. Ordinary people suffer terrible heartache. Farmers kill their children and then commit suicide because they know that they will never be able to feed their families.

 

   These tragedies, these heartbreaks, and these suicides get very little space in the media. Nobody cares for ordinary people and their stories. We don’t give a damn about poor farmers destroyed by the crushing weight of debt. We never focus on young women – of the same age as Nafisa or Viveka – who take their lives in similar circumstances. When an ordinary person commits suicide, it is not even a footnote. When a model, no matter how faded, kills herself, it is breaking news on some television channels.

 

   I am reluctant to blame the parents of the girls for trying to fix accountability for their daughters’ deaths on the boyfriends. They are broken people consumed by grief and acting irrationally. I am less forgiving of the police who like to turn every tragedy into a criminal case. But I accept that they are hamstrung by idiotic laws and under tremendous pressure from the press.

 

   When it comes to the media, however, I have no excuses. We are not acting out of grief or out of some sense of compulsion. We are merely pandering to the lowest common denominator for commercial considerations. We know that stories that combine sex, glamour and death find a ready market. And so, tossing aside all our normal standards of newsworthiness, we plunge headlong into the cesspool of tabloid sensation.

 

   I make no distinction between print and TV. Some TV channels have been more responsible than others. Some newspapers have behaved better than others. The worrying thing is that the journalists and editors don’t even realise that they are doing something wrong. The new credo is: if it sells, let’s do it.

 

   Journalists spend a lot of time diagnosing society’s ills. But sometimes, we should look at the state of our own health.