Two blood-curdling and gory acts of crime have come to light; both of them took place inside school premises; one in India’s north, in Haryana; and the other in India’s south, Andhra Pradesh. The intense brutality and violence unleashed by the offenders in both the cases have sent shockwaves all across the nation.
In Haryana’s Panchkula, inside the premises of the Sanskriti Model School, a boy studying in class 3 attacked in cold blood, a girl student studying in KG. The victim suffered severe injuries after the boy hit her head on a classroom bench-table several times, kicked her face, and then landed multiple blows on her head with a brick and a flowerpot. He also dragged the girl on the classroom floor by her hair.
Following the attack, the girlchild was rushed to the Civil Hospital in Sector 6. Upon examination and considering her serious injuries, the girl was referred for further treatment to Chandigarh. Her condition remains to be critical.
While further details in the matter are awaited, police have started probing the case and are questioning the school management and the boy’s parents, to determine what led to such a horrifying crime, that too inside school premises.
On the other hand, in Andhra Pradesh’s Anantapur, a 21-year-old man attacked two class 10 girls, inside a classroom in Rapthadu’s Zilla Parishad High School. While the accused has been arrested, both the girls have sustained serious injuries, and one of them is in critical condition. She is to be airlifted to Bengaluru for better medical treatment.
It was around 10.30 AM on Saturday when lessons were going on, when the accused entered the classroom with a power-saw and attacked the two girls. The accused has been identified as Hemant alias Dummu. As per reports, Hemant is a distant relative of one of the victims and is a resident of Nagalur village, situated in Dharmavaram Mandal. While he fled the school after the attack, he was swiftly arrested at the Dharmavaram railway station.
As per the police, one of the girls was attacked by Hemant first because she didn’t reciprocate his love, and rejected his proposal of marriage, and she was being harassed by Hemant. The girl had warned him to stay away, and had threatened him of reporting everything to her parents if he did not budge. She has suffered severe injuries to her face, head, and back. The other girl was attacked by him when she tried to intervene.
Both these incidents are scary per se, but what makes them scarier is that such violence took place inside school premises, leading to a right set of questions being asked about safety standards inside schools in India. If a student could attack another right inside a classroom with bricks and assault her, and a man could enter a school and then a particular classroom with a chainsaw, right in front of a teacher while lessons were ongoing, the chink in the armour of such schools’ security and management is huge and has to be reckoned with.
Another question that is worthy to be put up at this point is what factors are feeding such intensely violent thoughts inside minds as young as that of a class 3 kid. Let alone acting on such thoughts and impulses, such ideas should not even take birth inside the psyche of young people. Is it the wrong environment or excessively glorified violent acts in movies and series? This is the point on which each individual should introspect today.
Afterall, children as young as the accused from Haryana, and young people like Hemant from Andhra, are the very future of this country; and today’s incidents set a horribly wrong precedent, and paint a grim picture of this country’s present and future.
