This is just really, unbelievably sad.
If there had been some sort of an employment-assistance programme… something entrepreneurial, something anything, to help this man… some sort of govt-sponsored employment programme, he might have had more resources to rely on than resorting to despair and depression. Even just for his depression after losing his jobs, maybe some confidential phone-in counselling program. Anything to prevent this.
Gujarat’s shock over girls’ murder, BBC, 11 February 2004
Roshanbano is trying to understand why her husband threw their five daughters from a bridge to their deaths last week, before attempting to commit suicide.
The shocking events in the western Indian state of Gujarat are being blamed on grinding poverty and a marriage that had broken down.
Roshanbano’s husband, Salim, is now in custody facing murder charges. Salim, an auto-rickshaw driver from Bharuch district, took his daughters out last week saying they were going to a mosque some distance away from their village. Instead, he took them to the Sardar bridge over the Narmada river and flung them into the water one by one.
The girls - Suhana, Yasmin, Shagufta, Rukhsar and Simran, aged between three and seven - were all drowned.
Only the intervention of a truck driver stopped Salim from throwing himself to his death too, reports say. Salim was later arrested at his brother-in-law’s house after witnesses told police they had seen him pushing his daughters off the bridge. He had even asked to take his 10-month-old son, Sabir, on the fateful day, but Roshanbano refused to part with the boy.
Salim’s story is a tale of abject poverty, brought about by joblessness and local unrest. As the debts piled up, his relationship with his wife deteriorated. According to Roshanbano, her husband could not bear the fact they had no money and was stressed about the responsibility of bringing up the children. Salim has told the police his wife nagged him all the time. "The couple had been having regular quarrels over petty matters,‘’ a senior local police official, AS Vasava, told the BBC.
Salim was working in a power loom in the town of Surat when he married Roshanbano, his second wife, in 1993 - against the wishes of his family.
In 1999, the loom was torched during communal riots in the area and Salim found himself without employment.
He took up a job in a seedy gambling club in Surat until it, too, shut up shop. That was when he began driving an auto-rickshaw to make ends meet.
After Hindu-Muslim riots swept Gujarat two years ago, Salim’s father-in-law asked him to return to his village and helped him set up a small business selling vegetables. But the vegetable trade flopped soon after, and Salim returned to Surat to drive his rickshaw again.
The relationship with Roshanbano deteriorated as he drifted from one job to another. Police say that on the day the girls were drowned, Salim called his wife from a village some distance from theirs to tell her he was going to commit suicide.
He told her he and the girls had taken a train from the nearby town of Bharuch. Reports say Salim had stood on the tracks at Bharuch railway station for some time before he was shooed away by an employee.
He then took his daughters to the Sardar bridge, which stands 20 metres above the Narmada river.
Salim is reported to have given his daughters peanuts and allowed them to play before throwing them into the river.
Suhana, the youngest, went first and then Simran.
The others tried to escape but were chased, captured and flung off the bridge.
