With the arrest and imprisonment of the Indian couple, Chandrashekar-Anupama, in Norway last week, the “gross repeated maltreatment” and “abuse” at home has ended for the Indian child, who was growing up in Oslo. Sai Sriram’s physical and emotional scar will hopefully heal as he is currently under the care of his grandparents in Andhra Pradesh.
Sai broke several months of silence to tell his teacher how he was burned and belted by his educated parents and in so doing, his voice echoed the hushed cries of millions of minors who endure such sordid disciplinary measures at home. I say so because in a country where “spare the rod, spoil the child” is a parenting mantra bequeathed through generations, inflicting pain is still considered the best deterrent for a defiant child.
The hundreds who vehemently took to social media platforms, slamming the Norwegian government for their legal high handedness could well be considered as a random sample of this majority school of thought still prevalent in India. Cultural clashes, they argued, is what led to the arrest of the parents and not the systematic abuse they subjected their seven-year-old to.
Like me, many of you might have given a dismissive nod to that inane argument. Because we like to believe that we are not monsters who pounce on our children with scorching spoons when they misbehave.
However, does that really have something to do with our culture that our sympathies have to lie with the parents, even if they are abusive? Unfortunately, Yes!
Look at how the couple’s family — that is the abused child’s extended family — reacted to the 18 months and 15 months of imprisonment meted out to the father and mother, respectively. Chandrashekar’s nephew wanted to “seek justice” for the couple by appealing to the higher courts in Norway. Sriram’s uncle Bhushan was livid at the Indian External Affairs Minister, Salman Khurshid, for his stand that India will not intervene in the case. Dr Kalyan Chakravarthy, the child’s doctor in India, condemned the court verdict as one-sided as it failed to consider that the couple was under immense pressure to discharge their parental responsibilities.
Sai was indeed a difficult child to bring up. He is reported to be hyper-active and short tempered. His parents had high-stress jobs and had to take care of a younger child who was asthmatic. Yet, that does not mean that the special needs child rightly deserved the harsh punitive measures. Still arguments were rife that it was cruel to separate the young children from their parents. They meant having abusive parents is way better than having no parents at all!
If the scales of sympathy are tilting towards the parents, our cultural compulsions are making us believe that parents always know what is best for the child. Let me allude to a typical Indian upbringing to elucidate the “culture argument” that favours the abusive parents over an abused child. A good number of people of my generation grew up on a daily dose of “beating with bamboo canes at home and school”. Almost all children of my parents’ generation, (I have been told or rather reminded) were subjected to severe forms of punishments. We grew up on tales of how kids in those ages were deprived of food, locked out of the house all night, made to eat salt for lying ... They were subjected to such creative forms of corrective measures and it would not have even faintly occurred to those parents that they were physically and emotionally abusing their children. The bottom line was always — “It was all for their own good”!
In that context, we would have gone wayward and reckless if our parents did not have the wisdom to thrash us, at least occasionally!!
Spanking a child is not abusive, we Indians seem to agree! Burning is definitely abuse, so we argued on twitter!! But there are “for” and “against” camps when it comes to belting. We do have divided opinions when it comes to pinching and pulling the ears of a rude child. But one thing is clear: It is always left to the parents to decide what is disciplining and what constitutes abuse.
As there is not much legal framework against corporal punishment in India, the dividing line blurs as it did in the case of the Indian couple with an Indian upbringing. And thanks to our eternal gratitude to the cane, we find it easy to overlook the emotional trauma and mental conflict of a defenceless child against his abusive parents.
But child abuse is no less child abuse whether you live under the Himalayas or in the Alps. Away from the media glare, at home, at schools and even at nurseries, children are beaten up every day. Their tiny bodies bear scars and bruises — some last for a few hours and others remain a week or sometimes longer than that. These children grow up thinking that it is normal to get physically abused. Because parents make them believe so. The cultural cliches should cease to exist if we want a new generation of parents who don’t have to pay homage to the cane.
