Indian Man Kills Pregnant Wife In Murder-Suicide In New Jersey,

Indian Man Kills Pregnant Wife In Murder-Suicide In New Jersey



NEW YORK – A 35-year-old Indian woman, who was five months’ pregnant, was found murdered in her apartment and her husband was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. The husband Man Mohan Mall’s body was found in the Hudson River.

Garima Kothari, a chef, was found unresponsive with trauma to her upper body on April 26 by Jersey City police officers, the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office said.

Following an autopsy by the Regional Medical Examiner, Kothari’s death was ruled homicide. She suffered multiple injuries in her upper body.

Kothari’s husband Man Mohan Mall (37) was found dead in the Hudson River in Jersey City. According to a report in the Daily Voice, Kothari was a talented chef and Mall was an alumnus of the India Institute of Technology (IIT).

Lockdown misery and death for migrant worker

A worker on condition of anonymity said, the deceased was upset after construction stopped on March 25 and he was missing his wife and children.

Published: 12th May 2020 09:09 AM | Last



For representational purposes
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: It was poverty and joblessness that had driven the 29-year-old labourer from West Bengal’s Malda district to the seemingly greener pastures of Odisha three months back. Now, his dreams along with his body lay buried even as migrant workers of the country experience the biggest crisis of recent history.Employed at a construction site in IIT-Bhubaneswar, he was found hanging at an under construction building on the campus under Jatni police limits on Sunday morning. The police investigation suggested the worker committed suicide.

A worker on condition of anonymity said, the deceased was upset after construction stopped on March 25 and he was missing his wife and children. “He spoke to his family members three to four days back on video call. He used to frequently tell us that he wanted to return to his village and also went with a group of workers to meet their employer recently requesting to facilitate their return,” he added.

The deceased was observing fasting (roza) during the holy month of Ramzan and he did not return to his bed on Saturday night. When his associates woke up in wee hours of Sunday to have pre-dawn meal (sehri), they found him missing. He was later found hanging in an under-construction building on the institute campus.

His body were sent to his family members back home on Monday. The police directed the workers’ supervisor to buy a coffin to transport the body in an ambulance and a same was bought for `5,500. At least three associates of the deceased hailing from the district handed over his mortal remains to his family on Monday morning and later, they were sent to a quarantine facility by the authorities there.

“There are about 1,000 migrant workers staying in three different colonies on IIT campus and they are natives of different states,” said an electrician, Salman Khan of Uttar Pradesh’s Maharajganj district. Khan said their employer is giving them `400 to `500 per week and they were purchasing ration from it but the amount is not sufficient for many labourers, who are staying here with their families.

A tiles mason, Anikul Hassan of West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, said their employer assured that the work will commence few days after the first phase of the lockdown but construction work started only after May 3.

Migrant worker, stuck on IIT-Bhubaneswar campus due to lockdown, ends life

Migrant worker, stuck on IIT-Bhubaneswar campus due to lockdown, ends life

The deceased mason and other members of his group reportedly had an argument with their employer a few days back over making arrangements for their return to their native villages.

Published: 10th May 2020 05:44 PM | Last 

IIT Bhubaneswar. (Photo| Facebook/ IIT Bhubaneswar)
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: A migrant worker allegedly committed suicide at an under construction building on the campus of Indian Institute of Technology's (IIT) campus Jatni police limits late on Saturday night.

Police confirmed that a migrant worker hanged himself. However, they are yet to ascertain all the other details, including the name and address of the deceased.

Sources said the deceased, who was working as a mason, was a native of Malda district in West Bengal. He was reportedly upset as there was no work in the institute after the nationwide lockdown was imposed on March 25 leaving him with very little money. The deceased is survived by his wife, two daughters and a son.

The deceased mason and other members of his group reportedly had an argument with their employer a few days back over making arrangements for their return to their native villages. The police had to step in to resolve the matter.

"There are about one thousand migrant workers staying in three different colonies on IIT campus and they are natives of different States," said an electrician, Salman Khan of Uttar Pradesh's Maharajganj district. Their employer was paying them Rs 400 to Rs 500 per week and they were purchasing ration using that money. The labourers who were living with their families soon fell short of money.

A bus from Bihar reportedly carried the workers stuck here on Saturday.

"In our group, there are seven persons and the employer turned a deaf ear towards our request of arranging a bus saying that a passenger vehicle cannot be arranged for such a small batch," said Khan, adding that there are also many workers from Uttar Pradesh, who are staying in other colonies on the campus.

Khan and his group are not arranging a private vehicle as it would cost a lot to each one of them and they alleged that they were also not able to take the help of the State Government due to the restrictions on not leaving the campus.

A tiles mason, Anikul Hassan of West Bengal's Murshidabad district, said their employer assured that the work will commence few days after the first phase of the lockdown was imposed in March but so far the construction has not started.

"Our employer is telling us that West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is not allowing migrant worker's entry into the State. We are running out of money from the last three months and now we are desperate to return and meet our families for Eid," he added.

Meanwhile, the police said they have registered a case of unnatural death and further probe into the matter is on.

Operation Eklavya in Action at Premier Institutes

Operation Eklavya in Action at Premier Institutes
India is neglecting caste-based discrimination in higher educational institutions at its own peril.

Subhash Gatade
07 May 2020

It was exactly 13 years back that the Thorat Committee, constituted in September 2006 to enquire into allegations of differential treatment of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students at the premier medical institute, AIIMS—was released.

The first of its kind in independent India, this three-member committee led by then chairman of the University Grants Commission, Sukhdeo Thorat, had looked deeply into the many shades of discrimination faced by students of non-elite castes in the institute.

What it discovered after talking to students and faculty was, to say the least, shocking. Some 72% of SC/ST students mentioned facing some discrimination during the teaching sessions. 

Second, caste-based discrimination was prevalent in the hostels, for instance around 88% students reported experiencing of social isolation in various forms. The committee’s report also outlined the discrimination faced by SC/ST professors.

This context frames the alleged suicide attempt of a female doctor a fortnight ago in the same institute. The doctor, who worked at the Dental Research Centre of AIIMS, was allegedly facing sexual harassment and caste discrimination. This is another reminder that there has not been a qualitative change in the institute in the long years since the Thorat Committee report.

The report had recommended joint committees of students, residents and faculty to examine the social atmosphere; developing mechanisms to regain social harmony; formation of an “equal opportunity office” to deal with all issues of non-elite caste students; encouraging students of all identities to participate in cultural and sporting activities; creating a roster system for selecting senior residents and faculty. It had also asked that the Ministry of Health should closely monitor how reservation is implemented at AIIMS.

The recent attempted suicide is disturbing, for the doctor had repeatedly written to the authorities, including the Resident Doctor's Association, to examine the issues she was raising. The Association had written to the concerned authorities, including the health ministry, to take necessary action, which was never done.

Question is: was the administration’s inaction a result of caste blindness or deliberate neglect of a marginalised student? Definitely, the callousness of AIIMS’ administration is no exception. 

On 22 May 2019, Payal Tadvi, a promising doctor who belonged to the Bhil-Muslim community, ended her life in a teaching hospital in Mumbai due to ill-treatment by her seniors. The 26-year-old would have become the first doctor from her community, were she still alive today.

Payal had also complained to the management of her hospital about continuous harassment by her elite-caste colleagues, who were her seniors, Hema Ahuja, Bhakti Mehra and Anikta Khandelwal. She had alleged not being allowed to perform surgeries. She had confided in her parents and to her husband Dr Salman Tadvi about this and other harassment.

After Payal had died, Thorat said that the premier institutions are filled with bitterness about marginalised students. “Nearly 25-30 students in the top educational institutes have died in the last decade or so, but the subsequent governments have failed to take any concrete policy decision to end caste discrimination...,” he told the New Indian Express.

The logic of purity and pollution, which is the basis of caste and its exclusions, manifested itself in IIT Madras as well, where separate entrances to the dining hall were delineated for vegetarians and non-vegetarians in 2018. The Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle, a student group within the institute, had brought this issue to national attention. The segregation was withdrawn after tremendous public uproar. “Caste masquerades as something else in ‘modern’ society. In IIT Madras campus, it manifests itself as separate entrance, utensils, dining area and wash area in the mess for vegetarian and non-vegetarian students...,” the students of the APSC said.

In her essay, “An anatomy of the caste culture at IIT-Madras”, Ajantha Subramanian, a professor of Social Anthropology at Harvard University, investigates caste and the notion of “meritocracy”. She notes, “Caste and casteism have shaped IIT Madras for a very long time, generally to the benefit of upper castes”. Until 2008, when a legal sanction was given to reservation of seats in educational institutes for members of the other backward classes or OBCs, the general category made up 77.5% of student admissions. This, as Subramanian points out, indicates that mostly members of elite castes populated premier institutes. She wrote: “Not only students, the composition of the faculty at IIT-Madras is also overwhelmingly upper caste,” she notes, with 464 professors drawn from the general category, 59 OBCs, 11 SCs, and only two STs.

Rohith Vemula’s case was no different. Deeply-entrenched caste prejudices in India’s society and academic institutions, he said, reduced the value of a to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. “To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind,” his unforgettable and deeply poignant suicide note of January 2016 said.

This promising student of Hyderabad Central University, who yearned to become a science writer and was part of the Ambedkar Students Association, was unjustly suspended by the University in August 2015 after an alleged altercation with Hindutvadis students.

Rohith’s death led to a national uproar and created a pan-Indian student uprising whose focus was on justice for a young scholar’s “institutional murder”. There were demands for a Rohith Act to protect students from marginalised communities in higher educational institutions, much on the lines of the Nirbhaya Act. It was supposed to be an instrument to fight caste oppression and ensure punishment and dismissal of those who discriminate on grounds of identity.

What remains unanswered till date is how many students who could have been role models for their communities and the entire country will have to sacrifice their lives before we rise from our deep slumber. Should not society do a soul-searching for its complicity in these denials, humiliations and deaths. The poet Meena Kandasamy had written after Rohith’s death that the suicide of a Dalit student is not just an “individual exit strategy” but “...a shaming of society that has failed him or her.”

Yet time does not seem to be reducing caste discrimination and oppression, rather it is increasingly being normalised. The arms of the state; the legislature, executive and even judiciary, seem to be wanting on this score.

Caste asymmetries have seen a quantum jump with the ascent of Hindutva supremacist formations. With its ascent to power at the Centre and most states in 2014, the BJP has been “...systematically conniving to dilute existing provisions of affirmative action and legal protection to Dalits.”

The BJP government has diluted legal provisions that are meant to include more Dalits in university appointments, and it did not show alacrity in restoring the Atrocities Act to its original form when it had been watered down by a court order.... Instead, the UGC passed orders that reservations will be based on departments rather than for a university or college as a whole. Following this change in the rules, the advertisement for 52 faculty posts at the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University in Madhya Pradesh, to cite just one of many such instances, had only advertised one reserved post.

The dilution of affirmative action programmes manifests itself in some ingenious ways, which end up reducing the representation of members of marginalised sections in educational institutions. For instance, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, where a unique reservation system is in place, aspirants from backward districts, and students from weaker sections of society, are included in the rank and file of the institution. However, of late, there has been a qualitative change in the composition of the university. It has been reported that according to the Annual Report for 2013-14, out of the total 7,677 students at JNU, 3,648 (or around half) were Dalit-bahujan (1,058 SCs, 632 STs + 1,948 OBCs). If other deprived social groups, minorities and women are included, the elite-caste and upper class are a numeric minority at JNU, as pointed out by Abhay Kumar, in his 2016 essay, Assertion of Dalitbahujan Discourse in JNU.

But the recent suicide attempt and other changes ever since the university decided to revisit its unique reservation system, this last bastion of representative social composition is also under threat.

The author is an independent journalist. The views are personal.

“Only community sensitization can curb suicides”

“Only community sensitization can curb suicides”

Photo credit : Dr Uday K Sinha

Pritha Roy Choudhury | May 1, 2020 - 11:45 a.m.

NEW DELHI: According to data revealed by the National Crime Report Bureau, 10,159 Indian students died by suicide in 2018, up from 9,905 in 2017, and 9,478 in 2016. 

Uday K Sinha of the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences says educational institutions play a bigger role than any other organisation in sensitizing the community to help curb suicides among students as they can concentrate on individual cases. Talking to Careers360, Sinha emphasized the importance of policy decisions to address the issue.

Why is it that the number of suicides among students in higher education institutions rising in our country?
There are several issues, the main one being the stress that a child undergoes to reach up to a certain level and crack competitive exams to gain entry to an educational institution. The pressure continues both at the academic front and personal front.

Do you think that the victims come from a particular background?

The victim is found to be from a marginalized and disadvantaged community mainly. We should target the actual reason for the rise in numbers. Marginalized communities have lots of issues. They do not have the facilities and social models that the advantaged communities have. Here the disadvantaged continue to remain disadvantaged, those who belong to the creamy layer progress much faster.

What has happened and has been happening is, a child from a particular community, who has been targeted, could not bear the stress and then committed suicide. Educational institutes have tried because they come under the anti-ragging rules, but unfortunately, these continue to happen within the premises of campuses.

There have to be policies that need to be looked into. Reservation is one formula, but that cannot be the only formula. Secondly, sensitivity is essential, as we are becoming very materialistic, and third, the educational institutions also need to be a little considerate within their paradigm. It is not only academic excellence, but their emotional and human aspects are equally essential. Stress management is also very important, which needs to be looked into.

What role can institutions play?
A lot of institutions have started orientation programs in the beginning of the academic session. I remember being called to IIT Roorkee many times for the orientation program, which is basically for the students. In such programs, all such delicate issues are discussed. The students are briefed about what to do and what not to do. Most of the educational institutions also have a student support centre. It may not be a counselling centre. Those from a disadvantaged community require a lot of morale-boosting. Though a lot of educational institutions have started including such programs, there are many more which do not have such programs.

Do you feel that such programs should be conducted regularly and not just at the beginning of a session?

I think the law of the country is that. The UGC and similar regulatory bodies accept that institutions must have such support systems in place. You need to train counsellors for schools and for colleges. It has to be implemented in all the institutions.

Emotional and behavioural issues are very much a part of human being, and they need to be addressed. There are a lot of issues which hampers their academic environment, and they are related to their colleagues as well as teachers.

Is the implementation a problem, then?

To an extent, yes. Professionals are also missing. I would say you need to have a school counsellor and there has to be training for such counsellors. But in our country, there is no scope of training for school counsellors or college counsellors. There are not enough trained professionals at that level. Anybody with MPhil or PhD takes up the job. That should not be the case.

Do you think that there should be a subject on mental health right from school till the completion of education?

Educational institutions have a more significant role to play. The concept of the parent-teacher meeting is basically that. The parents should be sensitized about the child’s wellbeing. The teachers need to understand the family and regular interactions help both. It is indeed a correct thing and there should be a class to address mental issues right from school. All students should understand the importance and some component of emotional and mental health wellbeing should always be there. There should be a specific cell addressing the issues. And it should continue as long as they continue their education.

Also Read:
AIIMS resident doctor attempts suicide alleging harassment by faculty

Increase in student suicides from 2016: MHRD in Lok Sabha

Write to us at news@careers360.com.

'Master Chef: India'' finalist, husband dead in ''murder-suicide'': US prosecutor

01 MAY 2020 Last Updated at 8:47 PM | SOURCE: IANS

''Master Chef: India'' finalist, husband dead in ''murder-suicide'': US prosecutor

New York, May 1 (IANS) A "Master Chef: India" finalist whose restaurant had closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and her husband have died "in an apparent murder-suicide," according to a prosecutor in New Jersey.

Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez said that police found Garima Kothari, 35, who was five-months pregnant, dead in her residence in Jersey City on Sunday morning with injuries to the upper body and her husband, Man Mohan Mall, 37, in the Hudson River.

Both were declared dead at the scene.

"While it remains at this time that these deaths are the result of a murder-suicide, the final determination is still pending the complete findings of the Regional Medical Examiner''s Office," Suarez said in a statement.

She said that the medical examiner has determined after a postmortem that Kothari''s death was a homicide while the cause of Mall''s death was still pending.

Kothari''s restaurant, Nukkad, which opened in February in Jersey City, was closed a month later because of the COVID-19 restrictions.

She re-opened it partially in April for only pick-up and delivery orders and delivered donated meals to healthcare workers at the Jersey City Medical Centre, New Jersey magazine reported.

A week before her death, she gave an indication in a Facebook post about the financial difficulties of small restaurants and complained about large restaurant chains grabbing federal loans meant for small businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

She wrote, "Yet another tough decision "Nukkad is up and running" even on Sundays now. I would so appreciate the support of the community at this point of time! Existence in silo is not possible, hence I feel compelled to stay open & support my skeletal staff & be able to pay some fixed expenses (now that small biz fed loans have been lapped up by the Ruths & Shake shacks!!)"

Later, Shake Shack chain that operates nearly 250 restaurants and Ruth''s Chris Steakhouse with about 80 locations agreed to return the Paycheck Protection Programme loans meant for small businesses that they had taken.

When the restaurant opened, New Jersey magazine wrote that Nukkad "is an elegant-looking fast-casual Indian restaurant doing "Indian Soul Food" from chef Garima Kothari, one of the top 15 finalists from ''Master Chef: India''."

It said that Kothari had started as an investment banker in India but switched careers after her performance on the "Master Chef" show.

The magazine said that she studied pastry and baking at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and after working as a pastry chef she opened a catering company, Breaking Bread Co, in Jersey City before starting Nukkad with her husband.

Mall described himself on Facebook as an IIT Kharagpur graduate with an advanced degree in financial engineering from Columbia University in New York.

--IANS

al/rt
Disclaimer :- This story has not been edited by Outlook staff and is auto-generated from news agency feeds. Source: IANS

Indian man, pregnant wife found dead in New Jersey

Indian man, pregnant wife found dead in New Jersey
Posted: May 01, 2020 07:23 AM (IST)

New York, April 30

A 35-year-old Indian woman, who was five months’ pregnant, was founded murdered in her apartment and her husband was found dead in an apparent suicide in the Hudson River near here.

Garima Kothari, a chef, was found unresponsive with trauma to her upper body on April 26 by Jersey City police officers, the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office said.

Following an autopsy by the Regional Medical Examiner, Kothari’s death was ruled homicide. She suffered multiple injuries in her upper body.

Kothari’s husband Man Mohan Mall (37) was found dead in the Hudson River in Jersey City. According to a report in the Daily Voice, Kothari was a talented chef and Mall was an alumnus of the India Institute of Technology (IIT). — PTI