Words fail to describe the barbarity inflicted on a 13-year old vegetable vendor in Sylhet. Mindless cruelty is not quite foreign to people in this part of the world. But this one should be rated at the top of the list because involved here is a poor small child who was forced to support his family by vending vegetables. Devoid of any human feeling, his tormentors simply revelled as the boy shrunk in excruciating pains from the relentless beating to which he succumbed ultimately. Even his pleading for some water to drink was denied. What mindlessness! They had no sense that they were inflicting violence on a helpless boy and found it quite amusing to videotape and circulate it for others to derive pleasure.
It is unbelievable this can happen in any civilised society. But this has been happening for quite sometime now. On the day the boy was beaten to death in Sylhet, three more such incidents took place in different places of the country. In one such case, a young man was accused of a cell phone theft and, like the boy, was done to death. Cruelty in cold blood is one thing and committing something in the heat of the moment are completely two different things. People in this country are increasingly growing impatient but then they are also becoming calculative in unleashing violence on the weaker and vulnerable of society. There is no need to be an opponent. Is sadism becoming a second nature to at least some people?
The fact is lawlessness has more or less become the order of the day. More importantly, the oppressors or murderers are not tracked down routinely to make them face the law. When legal laxity allows the criminals to go scot-free, people become desperate and take law into their hands. When people's or society's development means only economic prosperity without taking into cognizance the inherent humane quality, the entire ambience turns out to be uncaring for human miseries. Quality of people must not be measured by affluence alone. If conscience and fellow-feeling take leave of man and society, it is a most hostile place to live in.
Now that outpouring of outrage from the locality where the brutal treatment was meted out to the boy has been strong, a question is not likely to be irrelevant. It concerns the inaction by people who witnessed the perpetration of the cruelty in broad daylight. Why none of them resisted or even informed the police when the boy was being tortured is no mystery. In fact, inaction and lack of protest against injustice also have contributed to the rise of criminality in society. If collective protests had been very strong and law took its own course, such developments could not have taken place. Now the need is to take a united stand against all such incidents -not just the expression of outrage for the time being and then forget all about it. The perpetrators must be given an exemplary punishment so that no one dare commit a crime like this in the future.
Brutality at its worst
FE Team | Published: July 15, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2026 06:01:00
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