[Achyuta
Rao, the head of a nongovernment children’s rights group in Hyderabad, got word
of Aradhana’s death from an anonymous tip posted to a child welfare chat group.
He filed a criminal complaint on Oct. 9, urging the police to charge her
parents with murder.]
By Suhasini Raj and Ellen Barry
NEW
DELHI — The police in south
India are under increasing pressure to take action in the case of a 13-year-old
girl who went into cardiac arrest after completing a 68-day religious fast.
The girl, Aradhana Samdariya, who died in the
early hours of Oct. 4, was a devoted follower of Jainism, a religion that
celebrates radical acts of renunciation.
Child welfare advocates called for her
parents and spiritual leader to be prosecuted, saying they encouraged her to
continue when the fast had clearly become life-threatening.
The police opened a case into culpable
homicide and child cruelty, but they have moved slowly, interviewing her
parents only twice and making no move to arrest them.
A child welfare group organized a march on
Saturday, calling on the police to arrest the parents and ratchet up the
charges to murder. Religious activists pushed for the criminal case to be
dismissed.
Aradhana’s death falls in delicate legal
territory in India, whose Constitution protects both the individual rights of
citizens and the rights of groups to their own religious practices, even
extreme ones.
Her father, who owns a jewelry store, has
said that he and his wife had tried to persuade the eighth grader to break her
fast earlier, but that she had insisted on continuing for 68 days, to match the
number of letters in a Jain mantra.
It is also evident, however, that her family
was eager to celebrate and publicize her extreme fast.
When Aradhana had completed 68 days of
fasting, she was dressed in bridal finery and paraded in a chariot before a
crowd of 600, including a member of Parliament from the area. Local Hindi
papers carried a quarter-page advertisement that referred to her as a bal
tapsvi, or child saint. People took selfies with her. She was so weak at the
gala event that photographs show her father carrying her over his shoulder,
like a baby.
Late the next night, after she had broken the
fast with some liquid, Aradhana began sweating profusely and gasping. The
family rushed her to a hospital, where a doctor pronounced her dead of cardiac
arrest, her father told the ANI news service.
Her father, Laxmichand Samdariya, has said
the fast did not cause her death.
“On the day she broke the fast, she was in
fine health,” he told a local news station. “It happened on the 70th day, not
even on the day she broke the fast. Nothing like that happened. If that were
the case, would we have paid our own child’s life in the line of fire?”
Achyuta Rao, the head of a nongovernment
children’s rights group in Hyderabad, got word of Aradhana’s death from an
anonymous tip posted to a child welfare chat group. He filed a criminal
complaint on Oct. 9, urging the police to charge her parents with murder.
“We say this is daylight murder,” Mr. Rao
said. “As per the rituals and for the prosperity of their business, her family
egged her on to do this.”
Investigators have interviewed Aradhana’s
parents and grandfather, said M. Mattaiah, a police inspector. He said there
were as yet no plans to arrest them.
In the meantime, many Jain leaders in the
area have rallied around the family, arguing that the state should not
interfere in their traditions.
On Saturday, Lalit Sakalchand Gandhi, the
president of the All-India Jain Minority Cell, based in the neighboring state
of Maharashtra, appealed to Mr. Rao to withdraw his criminal complaint.
“These are our religious rights as per the
Constitution, and no one can stop us,” Mr. Gandhi said in an interview.
He added that many observant Jains had
undertaken fasts more extreme than Aradhan’s; he said he knew of 13 people who
had fasted for 180 days.
Last year, a challenge to Jainism’s most
extreme form of fasting — santhara, or a fast unto death — reached India’s
Supreme Court, generating debate over when the state should be compelled to
interfere in individual religious practice.
Though critics of the practice have compared
santhara to suicide, which is illegal under Indian law, Jains cast it as a
protected form of worship, and it is most frequently embraced by people who are
old or fatally ill. A Supreme Court panel last year appeared sympathetic to
that view, suspending a state ban on the practice.
Jains, who number about six million, are a
powerful and prosperous sect, dominant in India’s diamond industry. They glorify
acts of extreme austerity: Some Jain monks are forbidden to touch money or use
electricity, and are taught to pull out their hair as an act of penance.
Adolescent girls are some of the most
enthusiastic embracers of diksha, or the renouncing of material things, and
diksha ceremonies resemble lavish weddings, with videographers and printed
invitations.
Members of Aradhana’s family said she had
kept her fast quiet, attending school for almost a month with nothing to eat
and only a bottle of boiled water.
“We do not know if her teachers or school
principal knew,” her grandfather told The Indian Express. “They never called to
inquire or anything.”
Ashok Sanklecha, the president of the Jain
Seva Sangh, an organization that oversees Jains in Hyderabad, said Aradhana had
visited the family’s spiritual guru every day to demonstrate that she could
safely continue her fast.
“She was very healthy,” Mr. Sanklecha said.
“She had completed her 68 days in normalcy.”
He said his organization would “stand by the
parents,” who he said came from “a reputed Jain family.”
“What hurts us most as Jains is that this
practice has been followed for thousands of years,” he said. “The practice is
not faulty. At an individual level, if this happens, what can the community
do?”
Follow Suhasini Raj @suhasiniraj and Ellen
Barry @EllenBarryNYT on Twitter.
