The Burari Case Study: Chapter 2
Welcome back to another blog. In this blog, we’ll be discussing chapter 2 of the Burari case study.
(The pictures used in this blog are nowhere related to the Burari mass suicide family so do not get confused)
Chapter 2 — The ritual.
At the end of chapter 1, we saw that Lalit Bhatia took his wife Teena’s help in order to convince the family members for a sacred ritual. Now you might be thinking, what is the sacred ritual? The family members had to blindfold themselves so that they don’t see anyone and they had to stuff a piece of cloth in their mouths so that nobody hears them screaming.
They had to hang themselves to the 11 pipes that were installed for ventilation. Since Narayan Devi was really old and couldn’t stand so she was the only one who was strangled to death. This ritual would take place between 12 am — 1 am, before this ritual they had to do something called havan (fire ritual performed on special occasions by a Hindu priest usually for a homeowner) and this ritual will be done either on Thursday or on Sunday.
Lalit convinced them that they will not die and that their father Gopal Das would come to help them. From around 12 am to 1 am the family members were seen in the CCTV cams where they were getting a few chairs for the ritual so that they could use the chair to hang themselves
All the family members were convinced that they will not die and that it is just a normal ritual. They had made all preparations for the next day, a few chapatis were ordered from a nearby restaurant for the next day and the kids had planned a cricket match for the next day. When everyone got ready for the ritual Lalit and his wife Teena tied everybody’s leg with a cloth. The family members followed everything that Lalit had thought them about the ritual. After this, the whole family hung themselves except Narayan Devi who was strangled to death.
This family had a really nice educational background. There was an engineer in the family and not just that Bhavnesh’s eldest daughter was studying masters in forensics, there were two 15-year-old kids in the family and to convince them for suicide was not easy. The question arises why would the family believe what Lalit told? and why would Lalit want to kill his own family members?
The only scientific explanation for this is Lalit was psychologically ill and the family didn’t understand that he was mentally unstable, this condition is known as a shared psychotic disorder where the partners accept, support, and share each other’s delusions. Coincidentally Lalit got back his ability to speak and helped the family to recover from a lot of financial issues and since this family was super religious so they trusted Lalit’s words blindly. So this is the only scientific reason why this family hung themselves to death
So this was all about the ritual in the next blog which is chapter 3 we’ll be discussing the public scenario after the ritual.
Till then keeping awesome
Signing off
Deeptanshu Halikhed