Thiruvananthapuram; On Good Friday, when Christians in Kerala remembered the agony of Jesus Christ dying on the cross, a three-year-old boy who suffered excruciating pain from torture apparently inflicted by his mother, succumbed to grievous injuries.
The incident was reported from Eloor in the outskirts of Kochi, Kerala’s commercial capital.
The toddler’s death comes only a few weeks after a seven-year-old boy was battered to death by his mother’s live-in partner in Thodupuzha in Ernakulam district.
The boy was allegedly ‘punished’ by his mother’s partner for his younger brother urinating in bed. The elder boy was blamed for not ensuring that his brother had not urinated before going to bed.
The torture that the Eloor boy suffered before his death in a hospital in Aluva, just as in the case of the Thodupuzha boy, has brought the focus on rampant child abuse in Kerala, a state purportedly leading India in terms of literacy and general awareness.
The Eloor boy is the child of a migrant woman labourer from Jharkhand — identified only as Hena, 28 — who has been arrested and charged with attempt to murder. A man identified as Shahajad Khan from Kolkata, who claims to be her husband and is a crane operator with a private company in Eloor, is under police surveillance.
The three-year-old boy was brought to hospital with severe head injuries and internal bleeding, besides burn injuries. The child was brought to a hospital in Aluva on Wednesday. The child’s battered body did not respond to medication, and the end came on Friday morning.
In another case of neglect of children, in Kozhikode, a woman locked in her three young children, and the children had to be rescued after a day. The three boys, aged two, three and five, are the children of a Thrissur native, and their mother is from Karnataka.
Their mother is believed to have left for Karnataka on Thursday, after locking the children at home. Her husband reportedly went off for work a fortnight earlier. When the children began to cry by Thursday evening, neighbours informed the Ferok police, who broke open a lock and rescued the children. The parents have been charged under the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act.
In yet another incident of child abuse, in the northern Kannur district, a man in drunken frenzy threw his eight-year-old daughter on the floor and broke the arm of his 12-year-old son. The 41-year-old man has been arrested by the police in Valapattanam. Neighbours said the man, who makes a living by fishing, regularly abused his wife and children.
