Couple ends life after torture
From Milap Chand Dandia

JAIPUR, Dec 14 — A young couple hanged themselves to death after the police tortured the husband for no reason. Before the two committed suicide the husband killed their one-year-old daughter. The heart-rending incident occurred in the state capital on Monday.

Ram Chandra Mangtani (27) used to run a taxi auto rickshaw. According to a lengthy note left behind in a diary on December 2 the deceased had some physical and verbal altercation with another auto rickshaw driver named Munish. After the incident the Sanganer police took Ram Chandra along with it to the police station but let Munish go. At the police station the policemen thrashed him.

When Ram Chandra complained of stomach ache he was thrashed and abused again saying he was making a false complaint as an alibi to get rid of the police. On hearing of police brutality Ram Chandra’s relatives reached the thana to seek his release. But as the eight-year-old son of the dead couple says relatives were chased out of the police station and Ram Chandra was again beaten in his presence. He was, however, released on bail the next day. Since then Ram Chandra did not get out of his home. On December 13 Ram Chandra and his wife decided to end their lives and before killing themselves by hanging, strangulated their one-year-old daughter with a plastic rope.

But before killing himself Ram Chandra documented his harrowing tale in the police station elaborately in 60 pages in his diary. “I am not happy to kill myself. I am doing this (suicide) with a heavy heart. I will complain to God about the policemen who tortured me and will pray that they too meet the same type of torture”.

He wrote, “It is better to die than live in this Gundaraj”. Ram Chandra and his wife had first considered sending their daughter to an orphanage but finally they opted to kill her.

The police, however, denies the theory of torture and says he was a person with an unstable mind. He was also suffering from asthma. The Superintendent of Police, Mr Saurabh Shrivastava, says documents recovered from his house reveal that he was a Krishna devotee and sometimes even behaved like Krishna himself. At the same time he was inclined towards Christianity as is evident from the Bible recovered from his tenement, the SP says. The police also says it has not come across any suicide note supposedly written by Ram Chandra. But the father of the deceased released copies of the suicide note written by his son also endorsed in writing by Ram Chandra’s wife Aasha.

Appending her note to the statement of her husband in the diary she had written: “Whatever has been written by him (her husband) from page No 5 to 65 is absolutely correct and true. The way the police behaved brutally with my husband on December 2 and 3 is highly insulting and painful and there is every apprehension of the same being repeated with me and him again. I am, therefore, committing suicide for this. No one but the police is to blame”.