A married couple on a farm in India appear to have beheaded themselves with an iron guillotine as part of a sacrificial ritual in which they ensured that their severed heads would role onto a fire altar inside a prayer hut.
The Hindustan Times reported:
A man and his wife allegedly committed suicide by decapitating themselves using a guillotine-like device, which they created at home, so that they could offer their heads for a sacrificial ritual in Gujarat’s Rajkot district, police said on Sunday.
Hemubhai Makwana (38) and his wife Hansaben (35) killed themselves by getting their heads severed by the blade of the device in a hut at their farm in Vinchhiya village, sub-inspector Indrajeetsinh Jadeja of Vinchhiya police station said.
The husband-wife duo executed the plan in such a manner that their heads rolled into the fire altar after getting severed, he said, adding that a suicide note was found at the spot.
The couple were apparently Hindu, and they had reportedly set up a makeshift temple to worship Shiva, a Hindu deity.
In an article published in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry in 2018, two researchers examined the question of suicide in the Hindu faith, writing: “The stand of Hinduism on suicide has been ambiguous through the ages, on one hand, condemning general suicides, while condoning religious suicides on the other. This ambiguity is reflected in contemporary India and among the Indian diaspora.”
Given the shock with which this particular suicide was received by the family and community of the deceased, it is unclear whether the married couple were acting on religious motives or out of some other personal or psychological impulse.
The U.S. has a national 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available by dialing 988 on a telephone, 24 hours per day and seven days per week.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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